Public health insurance and optimal income taxation

If individuals differ not only in their inherent capacity to earn income, but also in the probability that they will fall ill, can subsidized public health insurance be justified on the grounds that it serves as an efficient tool to redistribute welfare? This question is analyzed in a model where the social welfare function is a weighted average of individual expected utilities, and where taxation is by a linear income tax. The answer is ‘yes’, except in certain special cases.     

Taxpayers' responsiveness to tax rate changes and implications for the cost of taxation in Sweden

Historically, labor supply elasticities have been used to evaluate tax policy and predict tax revenue effects. They are likely to underestimate taxpayers' response to tax rate changes, and hence to underestimate changes in potential tax revenues, however, because they measure only how taxpayers alter hours worked. Taxpayers can also respond to tax rate changes by altering, for instance, their work effort and form of compensation. An alternative measure that accounts for these responses as well as hours worked is the elasticity of taxable income. This paper estimates the elasticity of earned taxable income for Swedish taxpayers using two different approaches and a number of control variables and the 1990/1991 tax reform as a “natural experiment”. The preferred elasticity estimates fall in the range of 0.4–0.5, comparable with recent estimates for the U.S. and larger than most of the labor supply elasticity estimates used to evaluate tax policy in Scandinavia previously, which suggests that deadweight losses are two to three times higher than previously thought. JEL Classification H21 · H24 · H31 · J22     

Customer satisfaction with socially responsible investing initiatives: The influence of perceived financial and non-financial quality

During the last decade, socially responsible investment (SRI) initiatives have grown to become a mainstream financial service in many countries. However, to date, only a few studies focus on understanding the final investor of such initiatives. This article focuses on one particularly overlooked aspect of SRI behavior; that of customer post-purchase satisfaction. A theoretical model of satisfaction with SRI-profiled mutual funds is developed and tested. The results indicate that perceived financial performance of the SRI-profiled mutual fund is the most important predictor of customer satisfaction. However, perceived environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance also had a positive impact on satisfaction for the SRI mutual fund. On the basis of these results, it is argued that although ESG quality is important to customers, marketers of SRI initiatives should primarily focus on the conventional quality attributes such as financial performance, as a good ESG record alone is unlikely to generate customer satisfaction.     

Do ethical investors want purity or effectiveness? An exploratory study on the ethical preferences of mutual fund investors

This article relates the result of an exploratory survey aimed at better understanding the ethical preferences of individuals invested in so-called ethical or socially responsible investment (SRI) profiled mutual funds. In order to get an insight into the moral preferences of investors, a range of questions and dilemmas were formulated to determine respondents’ agreement with one of two more stringent philosophical perspectives: the moral purity and moral effectiveness perspectives. Our results indicate that investors support both perspectives but have difficulties in choosing between them in ethical dilemmas. For financial services providers, this confusion among investors represents a major challenge in setting up and managing an ethical or socially responsible investment service. In essence, providers are faced with the task of deciding which strategies and methods that should be used in the ethical investment service, even though many customers may not know which ones they prefer.     

Children’s interactions with technology in teachers’ self-reported activities in Sweden’s preschools

International Journal of Technology and Design Education - This study investigates preschool children’s interactions with technology in a Swedish context. The purpose is to broaden our...