This paper synthesizes and extends the literature on the taxation of foreign source income in a framework that covers both greenfield and acquisition investment, and a general constraint linking investment at home and abroad for the multinational by introducing a cost of adjustment for the...

This paper integrates the distributive politics literature with the literature on decentralization by incorporating inter-regional project externalities into a standard model of distributive policy. A key finding is that the degree of uniformity (or 'universalism') of the provision of regional...

This paper shows that the government can achieve its precommitment outcome in monetary policy when output follows an autoregressive process, by offering the central banker a linear inflation contract, and where the parameters of the contract depend on lagged output. This note therefore offers an...

This Paper studies a principal-agent model of the relationship between officeholder and an electorate, where everyone is initially uninformed about the officeholder’s ability. If office-holder effort and ability interact in the determination of performance in office, then an office-holder has...

Advocates of fiscal decentralization argue that amongst other benefits, it can increase the efficiency of delivery of government services. This paper is one of the first to evaluate this claim empirically by looking at the association between education expenditure decentralization and the...

In this paper, we study a model a la Rogoff (1990) where politicians distort fiscal policy to signal their competency, but where fiscal policy can be centralized or decentralized. Our main focus is on how the equilibrium probability that fiscal policy is distorted in any region (the political...

This paper investigates whether it is possible to find Pareto-improving commodity tax reforms that harmonize taxes between two countries when governments supply public goods and thus have revenue requirements. To focus on the basic issues, we consider a Ricardian model of trade with elastic...

We extend the `rational-partisan' model of inflation to allow for the effects of unemployment persistence on the dynamics of inflation. We combine this model with the `exchange-rate-regime' model of inflation and examine the experience of the United Kingdom. Outside the fixed exchange rate...

This paper proposes a general framework for analysing commodity tax competition under destination and origin principles, based on three possible tax spillovers: the consumer price spillover, the producer price/terms of trade spillover, and rent spillovers. A model is presented which can be...

This paper studies the relationship between fiscal decentralization and electoral accountability, by analysing how decentralization impacts upon incentive and selection effects, and thus on voter welfare. The model abstracts from features such as public good spillovers or economies of scale, so...