Although the volatility of house prices is often ascribed to demand-side factors, constraints on housing supply have important and little-studied implications for housing dynamics. I illustrate the strong relationship between the volatility of house prices and the regulation of new housing...

With innovation increasingly important to economic development, innovation policy is attracting attention from politicians and policy-makers at all levels. Regional policy-makers face a distinctive challenge in that innovation takes place in international networks reaching far beyond their...

The recent process of political and economic transformation in eastern European countries has not only contributed to the decentralisation of political structure but also significantly enhanced the fiscal autonomy of municipalities in these countries. In this context many similar types of public...

A well known result in the tax competition literature is that tax rates are set too low in the Nash equilibrium to finance an efficient level of public consumption goods. In this model we introduce international spillovers in public goods provision and show that such spillovers reduce, and in...

This paper explores the benefits and costs of the voter initiative, a direct democracy device that allows voters to make policy decisions without involving their elected representatives. Previous research suggests that by introducing quot;competitionquot; into the proposal process, the...

The federal income tax code provides an incentive for developers to organize homes for different types of families as a single heterogeneous community. The property tax deduction and a progressive rate structure cause the property tax to be subsidized at a rate which increases with family...

The main purpose of this paper is to assess the effects of fiscal cooperation on local taxation in a decentralized country, using the French experience in urban municipalities. We estimate a model of tax setting for local business tax using spatial and dynamic econometric techniques, for the...

Because of endogeneity problems very few studies have been able to identify the incidence of corporate taxes on wages. We circumvent these problems by using an 11-year panel of data on 11,441 German municipalities' tax rates, 8 percent of which change each year, linked to administrative matched...

Standard models of fiscal federalism suggest many benefits of decentralization in developing economies, and there has been a recent push toward decentralization around the world. However, developing countries presently still have less decentralization, particularly on the revenue side, than both...