Within a tax competition framework, this note points out that the tax principle of Formula Apportionment may render corporate income taxation of multinational enterprises efficient even if a sales apportionment factor is not available. This is shown for constant returns to scale production...

This paper studies the relationship between interest group political influence and allocation of decisionmaking power in a potentially divided government. We consider a simple endogenous policy model in which a legislator is in charge of setting the levels of two different policy instruments - a...

This paper examines the cyclicality of Japanese public investment for the prefectural-level business cycles as well as for the aggregate ones. We estimate the public investment reaction function, in which regional business cycles are explicitly discriminated from national business fluctuations...

What is the optimal way to stabilize shocks and to take care of fiscal discipline in a fiscal union ? Among the various possible ways, this paper focuses on an inter-countries insurance scheme conditioned by the national preference for fiscal discipline of each government. We will show that the...

This study considers the factors behind municipality amalgamation in Japan from fiscal year 1999 to 2005 by using event history analysis. We use a discrete-time logistic model and a 21,165 person-year dataset. Our findings show that the central government's carrot-and-stick policy strongly...

What determines political candidates' election prospects? We match roll call votes of candidates for the majority elected upper house of parliament who were previously in the lower house with the preferences of their constituency as revealed in referenda. Thereby, we obtain a unique and direct...

In this paper, we investigate the impact of leadership in a tax competition game. We show that leadership by a group of countries is pareto improving for each country (leaders and followers) compared to a Nash equilibrium outcome. In addition, a coalition of leaders is also pareto improving and...

This paper argues that there is no race to the bottom when the social planner adopts a Rawlsian criterion, only the poor are mobile and they do not work at the optimal tax outcome. This argument is developed within a two skill-model of optimal income taxation.