Intragenerational solidarity and long term care: a role for in kind transfers

This paper is focused on kind transfers targeted at old people in need of long term care: it is assumed that they live with their children who provide them health care: the amount of health care is determined by free public provision, by additional professional care bought in the market or by informal care directly given by the children in terms of leisure. Then it deals with the implementation of a policy consisting of an increase in free professional care compensated by an equal reduction in pensions: the particular financing scheme can be motivated by a sort of intra generational solidarity. The proposed policy has the additional goal to promote a substitution of professional care for informal care in order to increase overall labour supply. Conditions assuring a positive change in public budget and in social welfare are derived: they depend by the mutual interaction of a number of economic, medical and demographic parameters: among others, household net wage rate, the ratio between income and indirect tax rates and the structure of older population

Sostituzione dell'IRAP con Imposte sui Consumi Finali delle Famiglie

Il contributo analizza gli effetti della sostituzione dell'IRAP con diverse tipologie di imposte al consumo quali aumento dell'IVA e imposte a carico dei consumi di beni a forte impatto ambiental

A Note on Pollution Regulation With Asymmetric Information

The paper addresses the problem of information asymmetry between a regulator and the polluting firms and proposes a very simple mechanism where the regulator is free to choose, without communicating in advance to the firms, between two instruments: an effluent fee or a standard: as a result in a real world setting this uncertainty might induce firms to a truthful revelation. Moreover, under the assumption of linear marginal abatement or marginal social damage functions, in many cases the resulting optimal behaviour might be an under reporting for some firms and an over reporting for others so that the resulting marginal aggregate benefit function might be not so far from the true one and the aggregate pollution level attained by the mechanism not so far from optimal

Time Allocation and Snacks and Sugar Sweetened Beverages Taxation

Obesity is a public health problem and several countries have introduced or proposed taxes on unhealthy foods. The paper analyzes the effects of the introduction of a tax on snacks/ssb in three different models where their consumption is a function of part of leisure time, due to the strength of habits and to the role of social cues in eating behaviour. All models encompass the possibility to perform physical exercise in order to reduce obesity (if individuals are weight conscious) and differ in residual time allocation: devoted to the bulk of daily activities, to labour supply or to other leisure activities. The main finding is that taxation always helps in reducing snacks/ssb consumption: nonetheless, in the first model, which can describe the choice of an adolescent, the tax might induce an increase in obesity in physically inactive individuals because of the shrinking of the choice set. In the second, it might arise if leisure linked to snacks/ssb consumption and the aggregate of consumption goods are separable; in the third, taxation achieves a decrease in obesity under weak conditions, and separability between the aggregate of consumption goods and residual leisure is sufficient to induce a decrease in obesity in physically active individuals. From a theoretical point of view, the paper underscores the relevance of the freedom to choose how to allocate time among different activities while, from an applied perspective, strongly supports snacks/ssb taxation combined with a campaign aimed at promoting physical activity even in the working environment

Welfare analysis of tax and expenditure reform

The motivation of the present paper originates from the current debt crisis of so many developed countries and analyzes, within a simplified model with a single representative consumer the welfare effect of a combined reduction in indirect taxes and public expenditure. As already demonstrated by a pioneering work by Gusnerie (1977) and subsequent literature, the bulk of information needed to be sure to get a welfare gain from this reform is heavy; under this respect a feature of the paper, to which less attention was paid, is a more detailed description on the side of public expenditure where multiple expenditure categories are allowed: this feature can be exploited to properly tailor expenditure and tax cuts. The main policy prescription arising from the paper is to concentrate expenditure cuts on categories with close private substitutes and a low marginal willingness to pay for them, and tax decreases on private goods with larger own price effects, weak relations with other private goods and complementary to labour. An important implication is that marginal willingness to pay could be the rationale for a new, or parallel, classification of public expenditure categories carrying incentives toward quality and efficiency