Firms spend considerable amounts on socially responsible business practices. These expenditures are often seen as an indirect form of profit maximization or a perquisite of the manager at shareholder expense. We offer a more direct explanation. Since shareholders enjoy both consumption and private benefits from public goods, managers acting on their behalf will (1) provision more public goods t...

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This paper establishes several propositions concerning the importance of context in valuing public goods. It first provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the value of a public good to be independent of context. Utility-constant valuation sequences are considered where public goods are systematically made available or taken away. For the case of strict Hicksian substitutes, willingness...

We reconsider the well known Becker-Coase (BC ) argument, according to which changes in divorce laws should not affect divorce rates, in the context of households which consume public goods in addition to private goods. For this result to hold, utility must be transferable both within marriage and upon divorce, and the marginal rate of substitution between public and private consumption needs t...

This paper explores the feasibility and desirability of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). We identify CSR with creation of public goods or curtailment of public bads. Using a model with pro…tmaximizing …rms, the paper shows that there is a direct parallel between CSR and traditional models of private provision of public goods. Indeed, …rms that use CSR will produce public goods at exactly ...

We consider a pure public goods economy with a continuum of agents. In the standard model, the optimal public good levels will generally be infinitely larger than the private good consumption levels. This does not seem to be a reasonable or even a comprehensible limit of a large economy. We propose instead to model internet and other intellectual content as our canonical public goods. We argue ...

This paper examines whether two regions should remain together within a fiscal federation, or separate, when their inhabitants have different preferences for publicly provided goods. The paper focuses on trade-offs between returns to scale in the provision of the goods, and the scope to tailor provision to the tastes of the inhabitants in each region. A general model is developed that includes,...

The paper shows that some frequently used measures of the degree of public ness of publicly provided goods and club goods are seriously a ected by metrization problems The paper proposes measures that do not depend on arbitrary metriza tion conventions and discusses the relationship of these measures to the question of private provision and optimal club size Addresses of the authors send corres...

The literature on public goods has shown that efficient outcomes are impossible if participation constraints have to be respected. This paper addresses the question whether they should be imposed. It asks under what conditions efficiency considerations justify that individuals are forced to pay for public goods that they do not value. It is shown that participation constraints are desirable if ...