Public Finance, 3rd Edition

Preface

The third edition of the textbook might be described as a substantial partial revision of the second edition. I added four new chapters to make the book more useful to a wider audience: two chapters on social insurance, one covering retirement pensions with an emphasis on the U.S. Social Security System and one on medical insurance; a chapter on behavioral public finance; and a chapter on international public finance, with an emphasis on international tax issues. The book could not increase in length, however, so these new chapters had to replace some of the existing chapters. I decided that the least costly chapters to delete were those on cost–benefit analysis, on the grounds that there are many good cost–benefit texts on the market ...