The Role of Home Production in Voting Over Taxes and Expenditure

Abstract

This paper investigates, first, how allowance for subsistence activities, or home production, affects the standard results in models involving the majority choice of the tax rate in a flat tax    –    basic income scheme. The paper extends the analysis of home production to choices regarding the composition of government expenditure, in situations where there is a tax-financed pure public good in addition to a transfer payment, conditional on a given tax rate. The effect of home production is to reduce the transfer payment in each model, but the effect is small.