We study the welfare effects of a revenue-neutral green tax reform in a federation. The reform consists of increasing a tax on a polluting input and reducing that on labor income. Households are fully mobile within the federation. Regions are unequally endowed with a nonrenewable natural...

The vast majority of federations lack exit clauses. Existing theoretical explanations of this stylized fact focus on issues of credible commitment, signaling, and the risk of strategic exploitation. However, such accounts are unable to explain the adoption by the European Union (EU) of Article...

Legislative bargaining theory suggests that fiscal transfers among member states of a federation are determined to a substantial degree by political bargaining powers. Malapportionment of the states' population in the legislature is claimed to lead to disproportionally higher benefits to...

This paper empirically investigates the underlying determinants of expenditure decentralization, based on the predictions of a new political economy model of partial decentralization. The analysis is based on an agency model, in which two levels of government are involved in the provision of a...

Although regional resources have been shown to influence secessionist conflicts in developing countries, their effect in established democracies has largely been neglected. We integrate regional resource value and inter-regional transfers in a model on the optimal size of nations, and show that...