A two-sector model of urban unemployment is developed which focuses on the formation of a secondary sector under conditions in which a demand shock in the primary sector leads to a sharp increase in unemployment. The optimal location in the secondary sector (treated as a single firm) is shown to...

This paper addresses the question of the optimal taxation of labour and interest income in an overlapping generations model with two unobservable characteristics, ability and inheritance. We assume realistically that saving can only be taxed anonymously, whereas the tax on labour earnings can be...

We study how political boundaries and tax competition among jurisdictions interact with the labor and land markets to determine the economic structure and performance of metropolitan areas. Contrary to general belief, institutional fragmentation and cross-border commuting need not be...

We model a non-cooperative energy tax setting game amongst countries who join an international market in which firms trade emission permits. Countries can auction a share of their permit endowment and issue the remainder for free to a representative firm. Each country's regulator has a double...

In this paper, we analyse tax harmonisation in the framework of two countries asymmetric in their capital-labour endowment. In the first part, countries play a non-cooperative game and we examine how na- tional fiscal policies are decided according to majority voting. At the Nash equilibrium,...

International markets for tradable emission permits (TEP) co-exist with national energy taxation. A firm trading emission permits in the international market also pays energy taxes in its host country, thus creating an interaction between the international TEP-market and national energy taxes....

This paper presents a political economy approach to payroll tax competition between countries adopting different systems of social insurance. It considers two such systems: the Bismarckian one where benefits are partially linked to payroll taxes and the Beveridgean one where benefits are fiat. A...

This paper provides a model of nonlinear income taxation in a context of international mobility. We consider two identical countries, in which each government chooses non-cooperatively redistributive taxes. It is shown that when skilled workers can move at low cost, the income taxation does not...