Mature federations have relatively transparent delineations of authority among levels of government; subnational governments enjoy considerable autonomy in their expenditure, revenue, and debt policies. In other countries, problems of soft budget constraints, bailouts, and fiscal and financial...

In this paper we argue that authorities aid cooperation by means of direct coordination or the enforcement of pre-commitment devices such as contract laws.Credible threats of violence allow this role. In a local interaction model, an authority forms if mutually connected individuals with...

The Commonwealth Government asked the Productivity Commisison to review cost recovery arrangements across the Government's regulatory,administrative and information agencies,and to develop guidelines for the future application of cost recovery.

In order to analyze conflict and cooperation between a State and a non ruling group in a general equilibrium, I unite pure rent-seeking models and economic models of conflict under an assumption of incomplete property rights. I show that a unique and globally stable Nash equilibrium exists in...

The note documents and discusses the modalities and consequences of the phenomenon of siphoning profits of state enterprises for private uses by state enteprise managers and insiders in Bulgaria during the period of early transition.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the different levels of tax rates on the use of the labour force in a range of OECD countries, using the methodology of effective marginal tax rates. Results for the United Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Japan, the United...

I investigate the idea that campaign spending limits may help to level the playing field in electoral competition between parties who have unequal access to campaign funds. The model assumes that the supporters of one party are on average wealthier than those who support a competing party....

In this contribution we illustrate various applications of a behavioural microsimulation model that we have been developing during the last years. Behavioural models are complex and costly tools to develop, use and maintain, but also very powerful ones as we wish to show through the examples...

Standard official measures of economic well-being are based on money income. The general consensus is that such measures are seriously flawed because they ignore several crucial determinants of well-being. We examine two such determinants-household wealth and public consumption-in the context of...