Keynesian Multipliers, Direct Crowding Out, and the Optimal Provision of Public Goods

This paper studies Keynesian multipliers in a macroeconomic model with monopolistic competition. We allow public and private consumption goods to be perfect substitutes in private utility. This enables us to study the effect of direct crowding out on the size of national income, profit and employment multipliers for a given rise in real public spending. A positive real national income multiplier is obtained if consumers value public consumption less than private consumption. In addition, we determine the effective marginal cost of public funds and the optimal provision of public goods, both in the short run and in the long run.     

Observable preferences for public goods

This paper discusses the circumstances under which it is possible to use the market or aggregate demand functions generated from individual utility maximization to obtain consumers' preferences for certain classes of public goods, and thus obtain the information needed to satisfy the Samuelsonian efficiency conditions for these public goods. The restrictions on the preferences of all consumers which are sufficient to use the aggregate demand function are: (i) there exists a price vector such that the level of public good provisiion is valueless, and (ii) the marginal rate of substitution of the private good price for the level of public good provision is independent of income.     

Does Government Expenditure Crowd Out Private Consumption in Italy? Evidence from a Microeconomic Model

An abnormal expansion of the public sector may create serious problems to the market economy, as the literature suggests. This issue is quite important in countries such as Italy where the size of the public sector and of its debt are quite relevant. In this paper a model, in the microeconomic tradition, is developed and applied to the italian economy using a quite general utility function to represent consumer's behaviour. The aim of the article is to set up a methological framework in which to test for the hypothesis that the provision of public and impure public goods crowds out private consumption. The main result of the analysis is that, in Italy, traditional public goods play a neutral role in expenditure decisions while impure public goods crowd out private consumption. This crowding out is created by over-production of these services; merit goods are direct complements to a wide range of private goods, but this beneficial effect is more than offset by the negative income effect related to their financing.     

Group size paradox and public goods

In an economy with voluntarily provided public goods and private product varieties, and a general class of CES preferences, it is shown that aggregate public good contribution follows an inverted-U pattern with respect to group size when private and public goods are substitutable in preferences. With complementarity, however, aggregate provision grows monotonically with group size.     

Optimal tax treatment of private contributions for public goods with and without warm glow preferences

Tax-favored contributions for financing some public goods may be a useful part of optimal nonlinear income tax and expenditure policy. There are two sides to the potential gain from subsidized donations. First, for a given level of public good provision, higher private donations from high earners than low earners eases the incentive compatibility constraint for donors and so can raise social welfare. This follows since considering a lower-paid job includes a perception of a drop in public good provision. Second, private donation reduces consumption, easing the resource constraint. This paper explores optimal policy, using first a model with standard preferences and then a model with a warm glow of giving. In addition to showing the conditions for the level of public goods, the paper considers the pattern of optimal subsidization across earnings levels. Analysis of optimal taxation with warm glow preferences is sensitive to the choice of preferences that are relevant for a social welfare evaluation. After considering optimal rules with formulations of social welfare which do and do not include warm glow utility, the paper considers the choice of normative criterion. Like the earlier literature, this paper assumes that organizing private donations is costless while tax collection has a deadweight burden. Since private charitable fundraising is very far from costless, the paper is an exploration of economic mechanisms, not a direct guide to policy.     

Factor Endowments and the Private Provision of Public Goods

The paper examines the consequences of increasing the size of the community in the standard model of the private provision of public goods when costs are variable. In contrast to an economy with fixed costs, the provision of the public good can fall with a larger community, and an increased provision of the public good is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for individual utility to rise. The paper also contributes to the literature on immiserizing growth in that it shows that capital accumulation can possibly result in lower utility for all individuals.     

Public Versus Private Provision of Public Goods

It is well known that public goods are underprovided in a static setting with voluntary contributions. Public provision—in a median voter framework with proportional taxation—generally exceeds private provision. This paper compares private and public provision of public goods in a dynamic setting. In a dynamic setting, voluntary donations can result in efficient provision. Also, majority‐rule solutions exist even when taxes are not proportional to income. At low discount factors, public provision tends to exceed private provision. As patience increases, however, private provision may exceed public provision. This occurs because many outcomes with a low level of public good provision—and potentially large targeted transfer payments to particular individuals—become sustainable under public provision. Under private provision, however, large targeted transfers are unsustainable. To finance the public good, private provision tends to result in benefit taxation, and public provision tends to result in progressive taxation.     

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.     

Collective Choice and Voluntary Provision of Public Goods*

Some public goods are provided entirely with private contributions, others with a mixture of public and private funding, and still others are entirely publicly funded. In order to study this variation, a model of dual provision is developed that endogenizes public and private funding. Households vote over an income tax that finances public supply of the good and on whether to permit private contributions. While permitting private contributions may lead to a reduction in total provision, a majority always favors permitting private contributions. Results are developed for small and large economies, and the relevance of nonexcludability and noncongestion are investigated.     

Imperfect Tax Compliance and the Optimal Provision of Public Goods

Our aim in this paper is to investigate whether the presence of imperfect income tax compliance affects the optimal provision of public goods within a framework in which public expenditure is financed by a general income tax that also accomplishes redistributive goals. We first derive the income tax structure, and then a generalized Samuelson rule. We argue that, under imperfect income tax compliance, it is desirable to distort public–good supply downwards, in the sense that the sum of marginal rates of substitution between public and private consumption must exceed their marginal rate of transformation.     

Government spending and growth in second-best economies

This paper extends public spending-based growth theory along three directions: we assume a logistic trajectory for the ratio of government expenditure to aggregate income, self-limiting population change, and exogenous technological progress. By focusing on the choices of a benevolent social planner we find that, if the inverse of the intertemporal elasticity of substitution in consumption is sufficiently high, the ratio of consumption to private physical capital converges towards zero when time goes to infinity. Depending on the form of the underlying aggregate production function and on whether, for given production function, technological progress equals zero or a positive constant, our model may or may not yield an asymptotically balanced growth path (ABGP) equilibrium. When there is no exogenous technological progress, an equilibrium where population size, the ratio of government spending to aggregate income and the ratio of consumption to private physical capital are all constant does exist and the equilibrium is a saddle point. In case of positive technological progress numerical simulations show that the model still exhibits an ABGP equilibrium.     

Old‐age Social Security versus Forward Intergenerational Public Goods Provision

This paper introduces an overlapping‐generations model with earnings heterogeneity and borrowing constraints. The labour income tax and the allocation of tax revenue between social security and forward intergenerational public goods are determined in a bidimensional majoritarian voting game played by successive generations. The political equilibrium is characterized by an ends‐against‐the‐middle equilibrium where low‐income and high‐income individuals form a coalition in favour of a lower tax rate and less social security while middle‐income individuals favour a higher tax rate and greater social security. Government spending then shifts from social security to public goods provision if higher wage inequality is associated with a borrowing constraint and a high elasticity of marginal utility of youth consumption.     

Equality of opportunity and optimal cash and in-kind policies

This paper examines the argument for public provision of certain private goods, like education and health, based on equality of opportunity by studying the utility possibility frontier of a society in which there is a concern for the distribution of these goods. A given quality of education or health services can be consumed for free in the public sector, but people can opt-out and purchase their desired quality levels in the private sector. Some of the conclusions are: (i) a pure cash transfer is optimal when the utility redistribution is either “sufficiently” small or large; (ii) if and only if both the equality-of-opportunity concern and the utility redistribution are large enough, can an in-kind program which attracts the whole population be justified; (iii) even when everybody chooses the in-kind program, it may be optimal to perform some additional utility redistribution by increasing the size of such program.     

Social network and private provision of public goods

Using a simple model with interdependent utilities, we study how social networks influence individual voluntary contributions to the provision of a public good. Departing from the standard model of public good provision, we assume that an agent’s utility has two terms: (a) ‘ego’-utility derived from the agent’s consumption of public and private goods, and (b) a social utility which is the sum of utility spillovers from other agents with whom the agent has social relationships. We establish conditions for the existence of a unique interior Nash equilibrium and describe the equilibrium in terms of network characteristics. We show that social network always has a positive effect on the provision of the public good. We also find that, in networks with “small world”-like modular structures, ‘bridging’ ties connecting distant parts of social network play an important role inducing an agent’s contribution to public good. Assumptions and results of the model are discussed in relation to the role of social capital in community-level development projects and to the effect of innovation networks on firms’ R&D investments.     

Consumer welfare from publicly supplemented private goods: age and income effects on demand for health care

In spite of major advances in the theoretical, positive and normative, literature analysing the welfare implications of public provision of private goods, empirical investigation is often limited to contingent valuation studies, for example, of health care programmes. In this article we argue that when a market for a (subsidised or free of charge) publicly provided good exists, a consumer demand approach can be used to construct a money metric of welfare corresponding to the consumption of public provision. We illustrate this approach in investigating age and income effects on household demand for health care in Cyprus, where free public provision is not universal and those entitled to it often resort to private supplementation. Our findings suggest that the money metric of welfare, which consumers attach to free access to publicly provided health care, varies with age and to a lesser extent with household income.     

VOLUNTARY CONTRIBUTIONS TO A PUBLIC GOOD: NON-NEUTRALITY RESULTS

Abstract.  We show that the well-known neutrality theorem (that a small redistribution of wealth does not affect the aggregate private provision of a public good) no longer holds if agents take into account the effect of their individual supply of the public good on the relative price of private goods.     

Ambiguity and Public Good Provision in Large Societies

In this paper, we consider the effect of ambiguity on the private provision of public goods. Equilibrium is shown to exist and be unique. We examine how provision of the public good changes as the size of the population increases. We show that when there is uncertainty, there may be less free‐riding in large societies.     

Public goods,voting, and growth

We study a parametric politico‐economic model of economic growth with productive public goods and public consumption goods. The provision of public goods is funded by a proportional tax. Agents are heterogeneous in their initial capital endowments, discount factors, and the relative weights of public consumption in overall private utility. They vote on the shares of public goods in gross domestic products (GDP). We propose a definition of voting equilibrium, prove the existence and provide a characterization of voting equilibria, and obtain a closed‐form solution for the voting outcomes. Also we introduce a “fictitious” representative agent and interpret the outcome of voting as a choice made by a central planner for his benefit. Finally, we undertake comparative static analysis of the shares of public goods in GDP and of the rate of balanced growth with respect to the discount factors and the preferences for public consumption. The results of this analysis suggest that the representative‐agent version of our model is capable of capturing the interaction between many voting heterogeneous agents only if the heterogeneity is one‐dimensional.     

Pork versus public goods: an experimental study of public good provision within a legislative bargaining framework

We experimentally investigate a legislative bargaining model with both public and particularistic goods. Consistent with the qualitative implications of the model: there is near exclusive public good provision in the pure public good region, in the pure private good region minimum winning coalitions sharing private goods predominate, and in the “mixed” region proposers generally take some particularistic goods for themselves, allocating the remainder to public goods. As in past experiments, proposer power is not nearly as strong as predicted, resulting in public good provision decreasing in the mixed region as its relative value increases, which is inconsistent with the theory.     

A generalized impure public good and linear characteristics model of green consumption

This paper provides a general framework for understanding consumer behavior related to goods and services that may be considered environmentally friendly, ethically produced, fairly traded, or some combination thereof. We generalize the impure public good model and derive its comparative static properties. The model accounts for any number of impure public (green) goods and joint production of any number of both private and public characteristics. The generalization provides a bridge between the impure public good model and the well-known linear characteristics model, both of which are special cases of the model developed here. The results show how demand for green goods and characteristics such as environmental quality depends on wealth, exogenously given levels of public goods, and the technologies of joint production. The effects of changes in technology depend critically on whether jointly produced characteristics are complements or substitutes in consumption. Several of the results are rather counterintuitive and differ in meaningful ways from existing models of impure public goods and linear characteristics. The results also illuminate several reasons for greater caution about whether it is reasonable to assume that green goods and services are necessarily beneficial for the provision of public goods.