We use the 1952 Swedish municipal amalgamation reform to study free-riding and the common pool problem in politics. We expect municipalities that were affected by the reform to increase their debt in anticipation of a merger, and this effect to be larger if they were merged with many other...

No abstract.

In this paper, we use data from a corruption survey conducted among top politicians and high level civil servants in 290 Swedish municipalities in 2007 to investigate the effects of government size on corruption. We construct several measures of corruption based on the survey, and combine these...

No abstract.

State subsidies to R & D or innovative investments in firms are organized in many different ways. Examples from the plethora of extant subsidy instruments are tax incentives, grants to researchers, project grants, loans, conditional loans, and grants with royalty rights. Very little is currently...

State subsidies to R & D or innovative investments in firms are organized in many different ways. Examples from the plethora of extant subsidy instruments are tax incentives, grants to researchers, project grants, loans, conditional loans, and grants with royalty rights. Very little is currently...

This article attempts a formal analysis of the connection between property tax and urban sprawl in U.S. cities. We develop a theoretical model that includes households (who are also landlords) and land developers in a regional land market. We then test the model empirically based on a national...

This article attempts a formal analysis of the connection between the differentiated property tax rates within urban areas and urban spatial pattern in U.S. cities. We first develop a duocentric-city model where the Central Business District (CBD) is located at the origin while the Suburban...

This paper examines the development of taxation in Sweden from 1862 to 2013. The examination covers six key aspects of the Swedish tax system: the taxation of labor income, capital income, consumption, inheritance and gift, wealth and real estate. The importance of these taxes varied greatly...

While previous research documents a negative relationship between government size and economic growth, suggesting an economic cost of big government, a given government size generally affects growth differently in different countries. As a possible explanation of this differential effect, we...