Cooperative fiscal federalism needs a multi-level consent to decide on the allocation of intergovernmental transfers. We study how parliamentary representation of municipalities on the federal level influences the allocation of federal transfers to municipal governments under this type of...

The paper argues that economic integration causes problems for the labor market of high-wage countries due to cross-border labor mobility and the accompanying increase in labor supply. Empirical evidence is provided from an analysis of regional labor market effects of German re-unification. In...

This paper exploits a recent devolution of tax setting powers in the German federation to study the effects of fiscal equalization on subnational governments' tax policy. Based on an analysis of the system of fiscal equalization transfers, we argue that the redistribution of revenues provides...

In this paper, we extend Henning Bohn's (2008) fiscal sustainability test by allowing for slope heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence (CD). In particular, our econometric approach is the first that allows fiscal reaction functions (FRF) to capture unobserved heterogeneous effects from...

A theoretical analysis considers the impact of a typical system of redistributive fiscal equalizationʺ transfers on the taxing effort of local jurisdictions. More specifically, it shows that the marginal contribution rate, i.e. the rate at which an increase in the tax base reduces those...