We study how the optimal public provision of health care depends on whether or not individuals have an option to seek publicly financed treatment in other regions. We find that, relative to the first-best solution, the government has an incentive to over-provide health care to low-income individuals. When crossborder health care takes place, this incentive is solely explained by that overprovis...

We use a very standard life-cycle growth model, in which individuals have a labor-leisure choice in each period of their lives, to prove that an optimizing government will almost always find it optimal to tax or subsidize interest income. The intuition for our result is straightforward. In a life-cycle model the individual’s optimal consumption-work plan is almost never constant and an optimizi...

It has been shown that an otherwise standard one-sector real business cycle model may exhibit indeterminacy and sunspots under a balanced-budget rule that consists of fixed and wasteful government spending and proportional income taxation. However, the economy always displays saddle-path stability and equilibrium uniqueness if the government finances endogenous public expenditures with a consta...

This paper empirically examines the impact of socioeconomic determinants upon the adoption of a recent UK e-Government initiative, the „Government Gateway‟. Five socio-economic characteristics that provide insights to Government Gateway adopters and non-adopters, as they were identified from the literature review used in this study. These included age, gender, education, income and occupation. ...

This paper examines the association between government ownership and bank stability over 1997-2010 across a sample of 103 countries. With a continuous variable to proxy for government ownership, our system GMM estimates indicate that the association between government ownership and bank stability depends on a country’s economic development and regulatory quality. In developed, high income count...

I develop a novel link between frictions in international financial markets and fiscal procyclicality. Complementing existing evidence, A decomposition of government expenditure into social spending and public good spending reveals that the cyclical correlation of social spending exhibits the biggest differences across countries. I build a small open economy model with income inequality, endoge...

Any summary measure of the degree of inequality in the size distribution of income is sensitive to the choice of both the demographic unit of analysis and ,the income concept. Thus, intertempora1 variation in a summary statistic will be affected not only by economic factors, but also by changes in either unit composition or sources of income. Recently, the post-World War II stability of the agg...