In this paper, we develop a simple theoretical model in order to explain how politicians choose between progressive and regressive tax schemes that serve to afford some local service production costs. It consists of a bipartisan model in which each party’s preferences are lexicographic, giving...

Tax Burden, defined as the ratio of total tax revenues over personal income, is prominently used to summarize state tax policy. We analyze the empirical relationship between changes in Tax Burden and changes in state tax policy from 1987 to 2000 – as measured by states’ own forecasts of the...

The widespread ennoblement of the Spanish bourgeoisie in the sixteenth century has been traditionally considered one of the main causes of Iberian decline. I document and quantify the surge in ennoblement through a new time series of nobility cases preserved in the Archive of the Royal Chancery...

Conventional wisdom has it that policy innovation is better promoted in a federal rather than in a unitary system. Recent research, however, has provided theoretical evidence to the contrary: a multi-jurisdictional system is characterized---due to the existence of a horizontal information...

Fiscal uncertainty has led many states to utilize a variety of economic and revenue forecasting methods. To improve accuracy, many budget analysts use alternative projections generated by different techniques. Composite modeling goes a step further and allows users to systematically combine two...

Using a panel data set for Dutch municipalities we estimate effects for weight-based, bag-based, frequency-based and volume-based pricing of household waste collection. Unit-based pricing shows to be effective in reducing solid and compostable and increasing recyclable waste. Pricing has no...

Budgetary difficulties in 1985 led the Idaho Legislature to adopt special fiscal measures. They included Agency appropriation cuts and a 14-month one-cent increase in the state sales tax. Similar steps had previously been taken in 1983. Data including the 1983 temporary tax hike period are...

In the absence of an equalization grant system, like we justify occurs in Spain at the local level of government, those governments that bear a decrease in their level of tax capacity will have to adjust their budget either by increasing their level of tax effort, by reducing their level of...

Property tax abatements are commonly used by municipal governments as incentives for heightened levels of business investment in their respective communities. Widespread statistical evidence questions the efficacy of such policies. However, many of the studies to date rely on data samples that...