We investigate the effect of inequality on the political support for public education funding in a model of endogenous fertility and school choice. In contrast to recent literature we show that when household income heterogeneity is consistent with the skewness of empirical income distributions, inequality can drive education spending in opposite directions in poor and rich economies. A mean pr...

This paper constructs a stochastic version of an endogenously growing economy with a public good that raises the productivity of private capital. We explore how growth and welfare are influenced by changes in the mean and variance of productive public spending under two alternative financing methods, mixed money–bond financing and wealth-tax financing. In addition, to evaluate the differences b...

Health care is a basic service essential in any effort to combat poverty, and is often subsidized with public funds to help achieve that aim. This paper examines public spending on curative health care in several African countries and finds that this spending favours mostly the better-off rather than the poor. It concludes that this targeting problem cannot be solved simply by adjusting the sub...

The basic idea is to excise the bitcoin money generation formula, and otherwise apply bitcoin essentially “as is” over digital coins which are redeemable by the mint that minted them. This will preserve the bitcoin assured anonymity. The new bitcoin.BitMint solution will benefit from bitcoin’s double-spending prevention, and would otherwise enjoy all the benefits associated with money in a digi...

Security: Forging paper currency is difficult. Unfortunately, electronic currency is just data and is easily copied. Copying or double spending of electronic currency should be prevented or detected. Ideally the illegal creation, copying, and reuse of electronic cash should be unconditionally or computationally impossible. Some systems rely instead on post-fact detection and punishment of doubl...

This paper provides a political economy analysis of (de)centralization when local public goods—with spillovers effects—can be substitutes or complements. Depending on the degree of complementarity between local public goods, median voters strategically delegate policy to either ‘conservative’ or to ‘liberal’ representatives under decentralized decision-making. In the first case, it accentuates ...

Increasingly the governments are facing pressures to increase budgetary allocations to social sectors. Recently there has been suggestion to increase the government budget allocations to health sector and increase it to 3 per cent of GDP. Is this feasible goal and in what time-frame? Health being State subject in India and much depends on the ability of the State governments to allocate higher ...

To study questions of taxation in the neo-classical growth model, we need to extend it to allow for government spending and taxation. Here we study the simplest possible model, where government spending is an exogenous stochastic process G(s). We assume that this spending is wasted (thrown into the ocean). It would be possible to amend the model to allow for example for the financing of public ...

We study the policy choices of an incumbent politician when voters imperfectly observe aggregate spending and the incumbent’s ability. We show that total spending is decreasing in the transparency of spending, but increasing in the transparency of the incumbent’s ability. The model further provides a possible explanation of the choice of inefficient tools of redistribution, and investigates the...

The cost of public investment is not the value of public capital. Unlike with private investors, there is no plausible behavioral model in which every dollar that the public sector spends as “investment” creates capital in an economic sense. While this simple analytic point is obvious, it has so far been uniformly ignored in the empirical literature on economic growth which uses, at best, cumul...