Internality Regulation Through Public Choice

[Background paper for participants in Columbia Tax Colloquium] Internality Regulation Through Public Choice

Much health and safety regulation can be understood as the product of political coalitions between two groups. The first, consisting of persons with self-control issues, enlists the government as an intermediary. The second either expects to benefit from the success of the first, or anticipates gains from a tax imposed on the first group’s behavior. A political entrepreneur might plausibly turn...

Rigidity, internality and analysability

We prove a version of Hrushovski’s Socle Lemma for rigid groups in an arbitrary simple theory.

Externalizing the Internality

We use a theoretical model and empirically-calibrated simulations of the automobile market to show how the traditional logic of Pigouvian taxation changes when consumers are inattentive to energy costs. Under inattention, there is a "Triple Dividend" from externality taxes: aside from reducing the provision of public bads and generating government revenue, they also reduce allocative ine¢ cienc...

Information and Public Choice

Happiness and Public Choice

Measuring individual welfare using data on reported subjective well-being has made great progress. It offers a new way of confronting public choice hypotheses with field data, e.g. with respect to partisan preferences on unemployment and inflation or rents in the public bureaucracy. Insights from public choice also help to assess the role of happiness measures in public policy. We emphasize tha...