On the Neutrality of Redistribution in a General Equilibrium Model with Public Goods

Models on private provision of public goods typically involve a single private good and linear production technology for the public good. We study a model with several private goods and nonlinear (strictly concave) production technology. We revisit the question of „neutrality” of government interventions on equilibrium outcomes and show that relative price effects that are absent with a single private good and linear production technology become a powerful channel of redistribution in this case. Contrary to previous results, redistributing endowments in favor of contributors is shown to be neither necessary nor sufficient for increasing the equilibrium level of public good.     

Private Information in the BBV Model of Public Goods

To analyze the private provision of a public good in the presence of private information, we explore the connections between two frameworks: the binary public good model with threshold uncertainty and the standard continuous model à la Bergstrom et al. Linearity of best responses in others' contributions is key to matching the two frameworks. We identify all utility functions that display this linearity, and we provide conditions ensuring that the minimal properties that Bergstrom et al. require for utilities are satisfied. Using techniques developed in the threshold uncertainty framework, we show existence and uniqueness of the Bayes‐Nash equilibrium—thus generalizing existing results—and we analyze its comparative statics properties. In particular, under the reasonable assumption that agents' income is stochastic and private information, we complement the full‐information crowding‐out and redistribution results of Bergstrom et al. If the government taxes agents' income proportionally and redistributes (expected) revenues lump sum, equilibrium public good provision can increase or decrease, even if the set of contributors is unchanged. Similarly, we show that crowding‐out can be one‐for‐one, less than one‐for‐one, or more than one‐for‐one. Finally, we extend our results to a multidimensional framework in which agents' unit costs of contributions are also private information.     

International Factor Mobility, Government Size and Welfare

An examination of the available data reveals that the size of government varies considerably across time and countries. By making use of a simple general equilibrium model, this paper demonstrates that size of government is affected by the availability of capital and labour within an economy. Specifically, this paper utilises a model of a closed economy that produces one-private and one-public good. Both goods are produced by means of capital and labour. Production functions are subject to constant returns to scale and perfect competition prevails in all markets. The elasticity of substitution between the public and the private good is greater than unity and there is no international factor mobility in the initial equilibrium. The size of government is measured by total spending on the public good as a proportion of the total expenditure on the private and public goods. It is shown that capital (labour) inflow can decrease (increase) the size of government. Capital inflow increases welfare if the private good is relatively capital intensive whereas labour inflow increases welfare if the public good is relatively capital intensive.     

Group efforts when performance is determined by the “best shot”

We investigate the private provision of a public good whose level is determined by the maximum effort made by a group member. Costs of effort are either commonly known or privately known. For symmetric perfect-information games, any number of players may be active and we characterize the unique (mixed-strategy) equilibrium in which active contributors use the same strategy. Increasing the number of active players leads to stochastically lower individual efforts and level of the public good. When information is private, the symmetric equilibrium is in pure strategies. Increasing the number of players yields a pointwise reduction in the equilibrium contribution strategy but an increase in equilibrium payoffs. Comparative statics with respect to costs and levels of risk aversion are derived. Finally, whether information is public or private, equilibria are inefficient—we provide mechanisms that improve efficiency.     

On the Private Provision of Two or More Public Goods

We extend the simple model of voluntary public good provision to allow for two or more public goods, and explore the new possibilities that arise in this setting. We show that, when there are many public goods, voluntary contribution equilibrium typically generates, not only too low a level of public good provision, but also the wrong mix of public goods. We also analyze the neutrality property in the more general setting, and extend a neutrality proposition of Bergstrom, Blume, and Varian (1986) .     

Existence of equilibrium and stratification in local and hierarchical Tiebout economies with property taxes and voting

Summary. This paper present the first fully closed general equilibrium model of hierarchical and local public goods economies with the following features: (i) multiple agent types who are endowed with both some amount of private good (income) and a house, who are mobile between houses and jurisdictions, and who vote in local and national elections; (ii) multiple communities that finance a local public good through property taxes which are set in accordance with absolute majority rule; and (iii) a national government that produces a national public good financed through an income tax whose level is determined through majority rule voting. In contrast to previous models, no overly restrictive assumptions on preferences and technologies are required to prove the existence of an equilibrium in the presence of property taxation and voting. Thus, the existence of an equilibrium is proved without any of the major restrictions used in the past, and sufficient conditons for stratification of agents into communities based on their public good preferences and their wealth levels are found. This model lays the groundwork for a positive applied analysis of local public finance and intergovernmental relations. It furthermore builds the foundation for the first parameterized computable general equilibrium model of local public goods and fiscal federalism. Received: February 1, 1996; revised version August 9, 1996     

The general equilibrium effects of fiscal policy: Estimates for the Euro area

This paper describes a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model featuring a fraction of non-Ricardian agents in order to estimate the effects of fiscal policy in the Euro area. The model takes into account distortionary taxation on labor and capital income and on consumption, while expenditures are broken down into purchases of goods and services, compensation of public employees and transfers to households. A newly computed quarterly data set of fiscal variables is used. Our results point to the prevalence of mild Keynesian effects of public expenditures. In particular, although innovations in fiscal policy variables tend to be rather persistent, government purchases of goods and services and compensations for public employees have small and short-lived expansionary effects on private consumption, while innovations in transfers to households show a slightly more sizeable and lasting effect. The effects are more significant on the revenue side: decreases in labor income and consumption tax rates have sizeable effects on consumption and output, while a reduction in capital income tax favors investment and output in the medium run. Finally our estimates suggest that fiscal policy variables contribute little to the cyclical variability of the main macro variables.     

Existence of voting-market equilibria

We show the existence of an equilibrium in a model where private goods are allocated by markets and the public good (bad) is allocated by majority rule voting.     

On the set of Pareto efficient allocations in economies with public goods

Summary We examine the set of Pareto-efficient allocations in economies with public goods. We show that even if preferences are continuous and strongly monotonic, it need not coincide with the set of weakly efficient allocations. We then study topological properties of the Pareto set. We show that it is neither connected nor closed in allocation space. Furthermore, if the public goods are local, the image of the Pareto set in utility space need not be closed or connected. We provide two independent sufficient conditions for the closedness of the Pareto set. The results are directly applicable to private goods economies with joint production. Our results should be of interest for general equilibrium and mechanism design theory; where for example, the properties of the efficient set are important for proving the existence of an equilibrium and for the study of the properties of monotone-path social choice correspondences.We thank Hideo Konishi, Tomoichi Shinotsuka, Nicholas Yannelis and an anonymous referee for valuable comments on previous drafts of this paper.     

The control of CO2 emissions and its economic impact: An AGE model for a german state

Since it is believed that CO₂ is responsible for 55% of the greenhouse effect, a CO₂ levy is now under consideration in several countries. For an assessment of the macroeconomic implications of an integrated energy and environmental policy we employ an applied general equilibrium model (AGE) since all sectors of an economy and all private households contribute to CO₂ emission. Our model is a temporary equilibrium model with capacity extension under adjustment costs and with abatement activities for SO₂ and NO_x emissions.The model of consumer behavior will result in a system of consumer demand functions for non-durables as well as for durable goods. The simulations show the cost of inefficiency in resource allocation if CO₂ taxes differ between industries and households. We finally present the marginal cost curve of CO₂ emission reduction.     

Consuming your way to efficiency: Public goods provision through non-distortionary tax lotteries

We revisit the classical result that taxation of private consumption is distortionary and therefore precludes the efficient provision of public goods. We introduce a nonlinear consumption tax which we call a ‘tax lottery’. Under this scheme, an ad-valorem consumption tax is supplemented with a lottery in which consumers can win cash prizes. The winning probabilities in this lottery depend on all consumers' private good consumption decisions. We show that for a given ad-valorem tax, an appropriately designed lottery can implement an efficient allocation in pure-strategy Nash equilibrium. The lottery component corrects the distortion in private consumption due to the ad-valorem tax, while the resulting tax revenue is sufficient to efficiently provide the public good and pay out the lottery prize.     

A STABLE NASH MECHANISM FOR QUASI-ADDITIVE PUBLIC-GOOD ENVIRONMENTS*

In this paper we present a simple game form implementing Lindahl allocations as Nash equilibrium outcomes, which has nice stability properties. we show that if the preferences of eaach consumer are representable by a utility function of the form a(y)x_i+b_i(y), where x_i(y), where x_i is the amount of private good and y, the amount of public good, then the Nash equilibrium of our geme is locally stable under the gradient adjustment process. This restriction on the preferences has been known in hte literature as the necessary and sufficient condition for the Pareto optimal amount of pukic goods to be independent of the private goods distribution. This type of preference includes quasi-linear preferences as a special case. but unlike quasi-linearity, this allows a non zero income effect of demand for public goods as well as private goods, which is often supported by empirical evidence. Our result shows how an equilbirium can be achieved over time by a decentralized strategy adjustement process for a fairly general class of environments, even in the absence of a dominant-strategy equilibrium.     

Public provision of private child goods

This paper analyzes the public provision of private goods for children in a politico-economic model with endogenous fertility. The government provides every child with goods that can also be purchased by parents in private markets, and the level of provision is determined by majority rule. Households with many children benefit from the public provision more than those with fewer children; thus, a political conflict arises between them. The distribution of the number of children across households, which is a crucial factor for determining which group is politically dominant, is endogenously determined by households' fertility decision. The sequential interaction between fertility and political decisions might lead to multiple equilibria: equilibrium with high fertility and low-private/public-spending ratio and equilibrium with low fertility and high-private/public-spending ratio. Our model could explain the large differences in fertility and structure of child-related spending across countries.     

ESTIMATING THE GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM BENEFITS OF LARGE CHANGES IN SPATIALLY DELINEATED PUBLIC GOODS*

The purpose of this article is to report a new approach for measuring the general equilibrium willingness to pay for large changes in spatially delineated public goods such as air quality. We estimate the parameters of a locational equilibrium model and compute equilibria for alternative scenarios characterizing the availability of public goods within a system of communities. Welfare measures take into consideration the adjustments of households in equilibrium to nonmarginal changes in public goods. The framework is used to analyze willingness to pay for reductions in ozone concentrations in Southern California between 1990 and 1995.     

Retailing public goods: The economics of corporate social responsibility

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 profit-maximizing firms, the paper shows that there is a direct parallel between CSR and traditional models of private provision of public goods. Indeed, firms that use CSR will produce public goods at exactly the same level as predicted by the standard voluntary contribution equilibrium for public goods. We compare CSR with government provision and charitable provision, discussing when CSR by private for-profit firms could have a comparative advantage in dealing with public goods provision.     

Equivalence of Lindahl equilibrium with participation prices and the core

Summary In a model of an economy with multiple public goods and differentiated crowding, it is shown that asymptotically the core has the equal treatment property and coincides with the equilibrium outcomes. It follows that all individuals of the same type in the same jurisdiction must pay the same Lindahl taxes and, with strict convexity of preferences, the same Lindahl prices. With only one private good, for sufficiently large economies we show (a) the equivalence of the core and the set of equilibrium outcomes and (b) the nonemptiness of approximate cores and their equivalence to the set of approximate equilibrium outcomes.The author is indebted to Vicky Barham, John Conley, Hideo Konishi, Julian Manning and Roma Jakiwczyk for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The author gratefully acknowledges the research support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.     

Relative price shifts,economies of scale and poverty during economic transition1

Economic transition is associated with significant shifts in relative prices between private and public goods. If, as a result, public goods claim a larger share of total expenditures, economies of scale in consumption increase. We show how relative price changes might alter the welfare of different‐sized households in the short run and over time. We illustrate, for a selection of transition economies, that conventional poverty profiles are quite sensitive to assumptions made about economies of scale in consumption. In particular, the common view that large households with many children are poor relative to small households (such as those comprising the elderly) is shown to be highly non‐robust.     

Public goods, merit goods, and the relation between private and government consumption

In this paper, we investigate the relation between public and private consumption, by constructing a general government spending data set, by function, for 12 European countries. In particular, we split government consumption into two categories. The first category—“public goods”—includes defence, public order, and justice. The second category—“merit goods”—includes health, education, and other services that could have been provided privately. Equations from a relatively general permanent income model are estimated by GMM. The estimates are fairly robust in showing that public goods substitute while merit goods complement private consumption. However, the relation between merit goods and private goods turns out to be stronger than that between public goods and private goods. Thus, in the aggregate government and private consumption are complements.