Public goods can be financed by direct taxation or a subsidy to private spending. This paper examines the relative efficiency and distributional consequences of the two methods. Efficiency is shown to depend on the price elasticity of private spending and the trade- off between public and private spending. When this trade-off is dollar for dollar, however, a subsidy is always more efficient than direct taxation. The gains from a subsidy are larger for a mixed good than for a pure public good. Looking a t distributional effects, the author shows when richer taxpayers may prefer a tax credit to deductibility, even though they face lower prices with deductibility, and also shows when richer taxpayers prefer direct taxation to either type of subsidy.

This paper explores a model where private charity and public transfers are determined simultaneously. In political equilibrium, the government "overprovides" public transfers, transferring more to the poor than altruistic taxpayers prefer. At this equilibrium, private charity is zero. Evidence for this result is found by examining various types of data from the 1920s to the present. While private charity currently exceeds $50 billion, very little of it goes to the poor. I provide evidence that this phenomenon of zero private charity began, as the model predicts, in the 1930s, the beginning of federal intervention in the charity market.

The problem of optimal exchange intervention is approached using the techniques derived in the "targets, instruments, and indicators" literature. The optimal exchange-rate policy is one of permitting the appropriate degree of exchange-rate flexibility rather than one of complete fixity or complete flexibility of the exchange rate. Although the problem of the optimal exchange-rate regime has been analyzed in these terms before, criteria previously employed, emphasizing the geographical or functional location of disturbances, are seen to be inappropriate for a portfolio balance model with some degree of capital mobility.

This paper examines how closely the minimum wage has been set to the most popularly stated goals of minimun‐wage policy. I first estimate these goals: the minimum‐wage rate at which the relevant labor demand is unitary elastic‐maximizing the total earnings of minimum‐wage workers (about $5.35)‐and the level that would lift a typical minimum‐wage worker's family out of poverty (about $5.17). I can reject that the actual minimum‐wage policy has been driven by desire to achieve these goals and find that a simple interest group model best explains the historical path of the minimum‐wage rate.