Despite the extensive international experience with the assignments of revenue sources to different levels of government, the public finance literature still lacks a general theory of revenue assignments. Two sets of arguments have been separately developed in the literature to explain and guide...

This paper develops a theoretical explanation why it may be optimal for higher-level governments to pay categorical block grants or closed-ended matching grants to local governments. We consider a federation with two types of local governments which differ in the cost of providing public goods....

This paper develops a theoretical explanation why it may be optimal for higher-level governments to pay categorical block grants or closed-ended matching grants to local governments. We consider a federation with two types of local governments which differ in the cost of providing public goods....

This paper develops a theoretical explanation for why it may be optimal for higher-level governments to pay categorical block grants or closed-ended matching grants to local governments. We consider a federation with two types of local government which differ in the cost of providing public...