Blockchain Papers

Giampaolo Arachi, Carlo Filippini

No abstract is available for this record.

Jean‐Marie Lozachmeur

This paper studies optimal earnings taxation in a three period life cycle model where the taxes raised to finance an exogenous amount of public expenditure are allowed to be differentiated across ages. Agents choose their level of education when young and their age of retirement when old. We first look at the problem of optimal taxation when the young can borrow and then turn to the case where young face borrowing constraints. It is shown that, without borrowing constraints, a first best optimum can be decentralized by setting a zero tax rate in the third period and a first period tax lower than the second one.\nWith the borrowing constraint, the government may not be able restore intertemporal efficiency in which case a zero tax rate when old may not be optimal.

Hyun Park, Apostolis Philippopoulos

We reexamine the properties of optimal fiscal policy and their implications for implementable capital accumulation. The setup is a standard endogenous growth model with public production services, augmented by elastic labor supply. We show that, when a benevolent government chooses a distorting income tax rate to finance public production services by taking into account the competitive decentralized equilibrium, public production services can no longer play their traditional role as an engine of long-run endogenous growth. This follows from a simple combination of Ramsey second-best fiscal policy and endogenous labor/leisure choices.

Martin Kolmar

In this paper we analyze the optimal degree of centralization for the supply of public goods. We identify the reliance on an exclusion mechanism as a central feature of the decentralized provision of public goods. An exclusion mechanism induces a contest between users of the public goods who want to free ride and the providers who want to exclude free riding. This contest explains the costs of decentralization. A centralized contribution does not rely on an exclusion mechanism to finance the public goods but on taxation which induces different types of transaction costs. A comparison of the relevant distortions explains the optimal degree of centralization of the supply of public goods.

Henry Tulkens

Musgravian" externalities, formulated and illustrated by Musgrave in a 1966 paper on "social goods" are seen in this paper as one form of the interactions that occur between the components of a federation.The original formal apparatus is first exposed briefly.In that context, it is then considered whether and how alternative forms of federal structures are likely to achieve efficiency.Following suggestions from the literature, three such forms are dealt with: "planned", "cooperative" and "majority rule" federalisms.Next, the relevance of non cooperative equilibria is examined, in the light of an interpretation of them as "fall back" positions when disagreement occurs among members of a federation.Finally, the question is evoked of what economics and public finance may have to say on the limits to institutional decentralization, i.e. on the choice between federal, confederal and secessional structures.

Caroline Hoxby

No abstract is available for this record.

Robert P. Gilles, Kyungdong Hahn

This paper discusses a general equilibrium model of an economy with multiple separately provided public projects. We assume an additively separable cost structure and consider valuation equilibria with separated finance systems, one for each collective good. Under non‐Euclidean representation we show the decentralization of Pareto efficient allocations by valuation equilibria and the equivalence of the core and the set of nonnegative valuation equilibria. In the case of Euclidean representation, every Pareto efficient allocation is shown to be supported as an affine valuation equilibrium that is characterized by a personalized price per unit of each public good and a personalized lump sum tax or subsidy. These results complement and clarify already established insights into Lindahl pricing and its generalizations developed in the literature.

Kevin J. Lansing

No abstract is available for this record.

Alessandra Pelloni

We propose a two factor endogenous growth model in which the government intervenes in the economy by financing research and/or education. We allow technology in public production to be different from technology in private production, so that public spending has a direct effect on the rental prices of factors. We characterize both the unique balanced growth path and the transitional dynamics of the model showing the steady state equilibrium to be a saddle point. We also show that while income taxation is distortive, in general, a Pareto optimal outcome can be reached by means of a consumption tax in the decentralized setting.

Pedro Cavalcanti Ferreira

In this paper a competi tive general equilibrium model is used to investigate the welfare and long run allocation impacts of privatization. There are two types of capital in this model economy, one private and the other initially public ('infrastructure'), and a positive extemality due to the latter is assumed. A benevolent governrnent can improve upon decentralized allocation intemalizing the extemality, but it introduces distortions in the economy through the finance of its investments. It is shown that even making the best case for public action - maximization of individuais' welfare, no operation inefficiency and free supply to society of infrastructure services - privatization is welfare improving for a large set of economies. Hence, arguments against privatization based solely on under-investment are incorrect, as this maybe the optimal action when the financing of public investment are considered. When operation inefficiency is introduced in the public sector, gains from privatization are much higher and positive for most reasonable combinations of parameters.

Alex Mourmouras

Government financing of schooling is necessitated by capital market imperfections. Governments are also res­ ponsible for maintaining a stock of public capital that enters private production function. In this paper the welfare implications and politics of these investments are examined in a version of Diamond (1965) growth model. It is argued that in decentralized environments where the working generation is decisive each period significant underinvestment in both schooling and in­ frastructure will be observed relative to the Ramsey equilibrium.

Robin Boadway, Isao Horiba, Raghbendra Jha, Boadway, Robin · 6 authors

It has realized since Pigou (1947) that if public goods are financed by distortionary taxation, the marginal social cost of providing the public good will exceed the actual resource cost by the marginal deadweight cost of taxation.

Oded Hochman, David Pines, Jacques‐François Thisse

The authors show that space matters in designing the optimal provision of local public goods. Geography imposes a particular institutional structure of local governments due to the overlapping of market areas associated with different local public goods. The optimum can be decentralized through local governments that have jurisdiction over market areas of all local public good types. This implies that the appropriate suppliers of local public goods are metropolitan governments which finance them through user charges and land rent. In addition, the authors' approach invalidates the prevailing theory of fiscal federalism, according to which a layer of government should be established for each type of local public good. Copyright 1995 by American Economic Association.

Robert J. Barro

One strand of endogenous-growth\tmodels assumes constant returns to a broad concept of capital. I extend these models to include tax- financed government services that affect production or utility. Growth and saving rates fall with an increase in utility-type expenditures; the two rates rise initially with productive government expenditures but subsequently decline. With an income tax, the decentralized choices of growth and saving are "too low," but if the production function is Cobb-Douglas, the optimizing government still satisfies a natural condition for productive efficiency. Empirical evidence across countries supports some of the hypotheses about government and growth.

Raymond G. Batina

public good whereby the sum of the marginal rates of substitution between the public good and some numeraire private good for all agents who benefit frqm the public good must be equal to the corresponding marginal rate of transformation, i.e., XMRS = MRT. This rule can be implemented in a decentralized fashion if the government has enough financing instruments available, e.g., person-specific lump sum taxes and government debt. However, whether or not the first-best benefit rule can be implemented when the government only has control over relative prices is an open issue. Pigou (1947), Diamond and Mirrlees (1971), Dasgupta and Stiglitz (1971), Atkinson and Stern (1974), Pestieau (1974), and more recently, Wildasin (1979, 1984, 1985), King (1986), and Batina (1987) have considered the effect of decentralizing the government's policy on the optimal first-best benefit rule for a public good. It is generally true that if the government cannot completely control the economy because of a lack of policy instruments, then the first-best benefit rule governing the provision of the public good must be modified as a result.

Philip J. Grossman

This paper analyzes one method governments employ to circumvent the discipline of a competitive system of fiscal federalism - intergovernmental collusion in the form of intergovernmental grants. Grants, it is argued, serve to encourage the expansion of the public sector by concentrating taxing powers in the hands of the central government and by weakening the fiscal discipline imposed on governments forced to self-finance their expenditures. The results reported suggest that intergovernmental grants do encourage growth in the public sector. The results offer further support for the use of monopoly government assumptions in public sector modeling.