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Veblens Theory of the Leisure Class Revisited: Implications for Optimal Income Taxation
(2010-08)
Almost all previous studies on public policy under relative consumption concerns have ignored the role of leisure for status comparisons. Inspired by Veblen (1899), this paper considers a two-type optimal income tax model, ...
The Willingness to Pay-Willingness to Accept Gap Revisited: The Role of Emotions and Moral Satisfaction
(2011-04)
While many earlier studies have found that people’s maximum willingness to pay for having a good is often substantially lower than their minimum willingness to accept not having it, more recent experimental evidence suggests ...
Inequality Aversion and Marginal Income Taxation
(2016-10)
This paper deals with tax policy responses to inequality aversion by examining the first-best
Pareto-efficient marginal tax structure when people are inequality averse. In doing so, we
distinguish between four different ...
Funding a New Bridge in Rural Vietnam: A field experiment on conditional cooperation and default contributions
(2011-05)
The ability to provide public goods is essential for economic and social development, yet there is very limited empirical evidence regarding contributions to a real local public good in developing countries. This paper ...
Paternalism against Veblen: Optimal Taxation and Non-Respected Preferences for Social Comparisons
(2014-11)
This paper deals with optimal income taxation and relative consumption under a welfarist government that fully respects people’s preferences and a paternalist government that does not share the consumer preference for ...
When Samuelson met Veblen abroad: National and global public good provision when social comparisons matter
(2012-09)
This paper derives Pareto efficient policy rules for the provision of national as well as global public goods in a two-country world, where each individual cares about relative consumption within as well as between countries. ...
Charity, Status, and Optimal Taxation: Welfarist and Paternalist Approaches
(2019-04)
This paper deals with tax policy responses to charitable giving, defined in terms of voluntary contributions to a public good, to which the government also contributes through public revenue; the set of tax instruments ...
Are Most People Consequentialists?
(2010-08)
Welfare economics relies on consequentialism. Whether a public action is good or
bad is then determined by the consequences for people, rather than for example by the extent
to which it infringes on others’ rights. Yet, ...
Keeping up with the Joneses, the Smiths and the Tanakas: On International Tax Coordination and Social Comparisons
(2015-05)
Much evidence suggests that between-country social comparisons have become more important over time due to globalization. This paper analyzes optimal income taxation in a multi-country economy, where consumers derive utility ...
Optimal Prosocial Nudging
(2019-04)
While nudges are still mostly associated with affecting individual choices for their own long-run interest, i.e. dealing with internalities, they are increasingly used in order to reduce externalities, such as environmental ...