This paper examines the equilibrium relationship between politics and the economy. I consider a repeated-election model with policy and office motivated politicians. The incumbent politician chooses a tax rate and oversees the activities of the private and public sectors. Politicians differ in their ability to increase the productivity of the private sector, and in their ability to transform ta...

We develop and test a model of social comparison in which individuals gain status through pro-social behavior (competitive altruism) and in which they endogenously choose the reference group and associated reference standard involved in signaling status (reference group selection). In our framework of private provision of environmental public goods, the optimal reference standard involves a bal...

Applied welfare analyses of redistributive systems nowadays benefit from powerful taxbenefit microsimulation programs combined with administrative data. Arguably, most of the distributional studies of that kind focus on social welfare defined as a function – typically inequality or poverty indices – of household equivalized income. In parallel, economic research has made considerable progress i...

Seventeen Escherichia coli isolates from dogs with urinary tract infection (UTI) were characterized with respect to phylogenetic background and virulence genotype and were compared with the E. coli reference (ECOR) collection and with human clinical isolates with similar serotypes from patients with diverse extraintestinal infections. Most of the canine urine isolates were from (virulence-assoc...

The birth of children often shifts the power balance within a family. If family decisions are made according to the spouses' welfare function, this shift in power may lead to a time consistency problem. The allocation of resources after the birth of children may differ from the ex-ante optimal choice. In a model of cooperative decision making within a family, we show that this time consistency ...

Whether the sales tax is included in the price or added on at the cash register ought not affect purchases of the rational consumer. We test this tax-equivalence hypothesis with a number of experimental treatments that differ only in their handling of the tax. Subjects are given a cash budget from which they decide how much to keep and how much to spend on various attractively priced goods. Sub...

The paper discusses a number of threats to the financial sustainability of social spending: increased internationalization of national economies, gradually higher relative costs of producing a number of human services, the “graying” of the population, slower productivity growth in the private sector, low employment rates, and various types of disincentive effects related to the welfare state it...

The Determinants of Motherhood and Work Status: A Survey In this paper we present important empirical evidence regarding recent trends in women’s participation and fertility in European countries, and provide several interpretations of the differences across countries. Several recent analyses have considered labour supply and fertility as a joint decision and have explicitly taken into account ...

This paper uses a reform in Illinois that reduced the monthly subsidy offered to relatives asked to provide foster care as a plausibly exogenous change in the cost of caring for related children. Families offered a 30% lower wage were 15% less likely to provide care, with especially large declines for children who require mental health services, infants and teenagers. One innovation is a sample...

This paper estimates an Euler equation for per capita consumption to investigate whether social security increases consumption ceteris paribus in seventeen countries. Following the seminal work of Martin Feldstein, the literature has estimated consumption functions to address this question. Unfortunately, consumption functions confound structural and expectational parameters, making their inter...