We estimate whether federal aid for state and local governments played a role in advancing population testing for COVID-19 and the administration of vaccines. To overcome biases that can result from the endogeneity of federal aid allocations, we use an instrumental-variables estimator reliant on...

A classic problem in public finance is the over-expenditure of local governments in expectation of a bailout from higher-level administrations. While monitoring could mitigate agency problems, it can itself be rendered ineffective if auditors are corruptible. I evaluate whether limiting...

Switzerland could be considered as a test case for international corporate-tax policy coordination. It is a federation of 26 fiscally autonomous cantons that have been taxing corporate profits more or less independently for over a century. We document and discuss corporate taxation in...

In theory, federal transfers that make household location decisions efficient should ignore local cost differences, subsidize positive externalities, and offset differences in federal-tax payments and local taxes levied on non-residents, but not local tax revenues from residents. Transfers that...

Under most federal environmental laws and some health and safety laws, states may apply for "primacy," that is, authority to implement and enforce federal law, through a process known as "authorization." Some observers fear that states use authorization to adopt more lax policies in a regulatory...

This paper studies how to design a fiscal constitution that, by capitalizing intergenerational spillovers into land values, is able to protect future generations from expropriation and to generate optimal investment in intergenerational public goods. In particular, we study how to accomplish...

We exploit three natural experiments in Argentina in order to study the role of legislative malapportionment on the biased federal tax sharing scheme prevalent in the country. We do not find support to attribute it to legislative malapportionment during periods when democratic governments were...

This paper studies the repayment of regional debt in a multi-region economy with a central authority: who pays the obligation issued by a region? With commitment, a central government will use its taxation power to smooth distortionary taxes across regions. Absent commitment, the central...