There is much evidence against the so-called "too big to fail" hypothesis in the case of bailouts to sub-national governments. We look at a model where districts of different size provide local public goods with positive spillovers. Matching grants of a central government can induce...

Recent contributions on tax competition recognize the interaction between both horizontal and vertical tax externalities in a single federation. In this paper, we extend the theoretical analysis to a framework with multiple federations (a Union). We show that the relative size of a federation in...

Local governments have borrowed largely from the banking system to finance their deficits instead of responding to the rigors of bond markets. This paper analizes how sub-national governments optimally reallocate the provision of public goods and decide on borrowing, in a model where the banking...