Governments pursue fiscal decentralization for a variety of reasons: to make government more responsive and accountable to the people, to increase the efficiency of the public sector, and to promote national cohesion. Generally speaking, public sector economists emphasize the accountability and...

This paper examines the pattern of income mobility during the 1980s and the mid 1990s. It employs a panel of individual income tax returns for the years 1979 through 1995 to study this pattern, and explore whether income mobility has increased during the period. We focus on working age...

India's fiscal deficit and steep deterioration in state finances is a source of concern. The literature abounds with references to the combined fiscal deficit of the center and the states currently at over 10 per cent of GDP. During no other eight year period has the debt-GDP ratio rose by more...

We use an experimental method to investigate whether systematic relationships exist across distinct aspects of individual preferences: risk aversion in monetary outcomes, altruism in a two-person context, and social preferences in a larger group context. Individual preferences across these three...

This paper explores the impact of globalization on the micro-determinants of agglomeration, namely labor pooling (LP), goods pooling (GP), and idea pooling (IP). According to our estimates, LP now has a negative effect on employment agglomeration in U.S. manufacturing. More specifically, we find...

In 2001 the Russian government introduced a bold reform of its tax system, which included the adoption of a flat-rate income tax. Until then, only a few countries, including the transition countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, had adopted a flat-rate income tax. This reform has naturally...

This study sheds light on the difficulties people face in cooperating to resist coercion. We adapt a threshold public goods game to investigate whether people are able to cooperate to resist coercion despite individual incentives to free-ride. Behavior in this resistance game is similar to that...