We set up a general model on capital mobility which contains many of the models in the literature as special cases. The race to the bottom results not from a capital flight effect, but rather from a kind of Laffer curve effect in public good provision. Selectively introducing simplifying...

A large literature examines government fiscal interactions in federations. However, the empirical evidence is scattered and inconclusive, especially with respect to the size of interactions, as well as the institutional and economic determinants underpinning them. This paper uses meta-regression...

According to the Globalization Paradox, globalization limits the freedom of choice for national governments. Capital mobility in particular induces tax competition, thus putting downward pressure on capital taxes. However, while capital mobility introduces the inefficiency of tax competition, it...

In this paper we test the hypothesis that intergovernmental grants allocated to co-partisans buy more political support than grants allocated to local governments controlled by opposition parties. We use a rich Spanish database containing information about the grants received by 617...

Random factors such as bad weather or exogenous economic shocks affect the re-election of politicians and can reduce accountability. Such distorted election choices interact with the architecture of government. Contrasting centralized with decentralized political systems, this study shows that...

The aim of the paper is to analyze a model of local public good provision with positive interjurisdictional spillovers comparing decentralized and centralized system. As in the recent Second Generation Theory (SGT) of fiscal federalism (Seabright 1996; Lockwood 2002, 2006; Besley and Coate 2003; Weingast...

We ask whether the birthplaces of Italian members of Parliament are favoured in the allocation of central government transfers. Using a panel of municipalities for the years between 1994 and 2006, we find that municipal governments of legislators’ birth towns receive larger transfers per...

Did austerity cause Brexit? This paper shows that the rise of popular support for the UK Independence Party (UKIP), as the single most important correlate of the subsequent Leave vote in the 2016 European Union (EU) referendum, along with broader measures of political dissatisfaction, are...

We investigate the extent to which the intensity of political competition moderates the governance issues that arise in relation to Canada’s fiscal structure. By fiscal structure we mean three distinct but interrelated fiscal dimensions of the state: financial stability, long run size and...

Using estimates of support for Leave across UK local authority areas constructed from a comprehensive 20,000 strong survey, we show that both the level and the geographic variation capturing differential degrees of support for Leave have changed significantly since the 2016 EU referendum. A lot...