Increasingly, economic development experts are abandoning traditional approaches to economic development that rely on recruiting large enterprises with tax breaks, financial incentives, and other inducements. Instead, they are relying on building businesses from the ground up and supporting the...

Using the experience of Papua New Guinea as a case study, this paper examines the importance of political and administrative organization and electoral politics for fostering subnational autonomy and accountability in decentralized developing countries, and hence the success of fiscal...

We expand the traditional tax incentive redundancy argument by investigating the implications of targeting incentives primarily to firms that would have invested anyway. Incorporating government revenue constraints, pliable tax officials, endogenous tax liabilities, and firms with heterogeneous...

Expansion and improvement of public services is essential to improving quality of life and productivity in developing countries. Some African countries have been diligent in expanding the infrastructure necessary to provide public services, but unfortunately, most have not done a very good job...

There are a number of possible explanations for the seemingly irresponsible financial behavior of many Americans. In this paper we argue that an important explanation is simply ignorance: consumers often make poor financial decisions because they do not know how to make good ones. In particular,...

To date empirical studies of the economic effects of changes in state corporate income tax apportionment policies have used only highly aggregated, state-level data. This study uses data at the individual firm level, which is provided by a population of corporate income tax returns from the...

Nonbusiness bankruptcy filing rates have increased very rapidly over the last couple of decades.  In 1980, roughly 15 of every 10,000 Americans filed for bankruptcy protection. By 2004, that number had reached 54 of every 10,000 Americans.  These alarming increases in bankruptcy filing rates...

This paper modifies a model proposed by Anand and Sansing (2000) to explain why states have chosen different formulas for corporate income apportionment.  I demonstrate that nexus assumptions and allocation rules can have significant effects on the outcomes of the model, and are important...

In Jamaica, as in most countries, consumption taxes in the form of a value-added tax called the General Consumption Tax (GCT) and several excise taxes collectively known as the Special Consumption Tax (SCT) are critically important revenue sources, accounting for 37.4 percent of total revenues...