A multi-jurisdictional system is thought to improve, through yardstick competition, accountability. At the same time equalization programs, a common feature of multijurisdictional systems, are thought to be a prerequisite for both efficiency of the internal market and the equity objective of the...

The recent literature has emphasized that government intervention when consumers have quasi-hyperbolic preferences ('bias for the present') over consumption is not welfare-enhancing. This paper introduces a market imperfection (which takes the form of a negative externality) and shows that...

Quasi‐hyperbolic discounted preferences imply that consumers overemphasize immediate current rewards and overlook future ones (they have a “bias for the present”). Within this context the literature has emphasized that the misalignment between immediate and future rewards can be rectified...

Conventional wisdom has it that policy innovation is better promoted in a federal rather than in a unitary system. Recent research, however, has provided theoretical evidence to the contrary: a multi-jurisdictional system is characterized - due to the existence of a horizontal information...

We consider the hold-up problem between a foreign direct investor and the government(s) in a host country with weak governmental structure and lack of power to commit. Using Nash threats, we show that an efficient investment level can be sustained for a sufficiently high discount factor and ask...

This paper explores the role of information transmission and misaligned interests across levels of government in explaining variation in the degree of decentralization across countries. Within a two-sided incomplete information principal-agent framework, it analyzes two alternative...

This paper identifies conditions under which, starting from any tax distorting equilibrium, destination- and origin-based indirect tax-harmonizing reforms are potentially Pareto improving in the presence of global public goods. The first condition (unrequited transfers between governments)...

This paper explores the role of trade instruments in globally efficient climate policies, focusing on the central issue of whether border tax adjustment (BTA) is warranted when carbon prices differ internationally. It shows that tariff policy has a role in easing crosscountry distributional...

Border Carbon Adjustment Mechanisms (BCAMs) are becoming reality in the EU and elsewhere, and recur—in very different form—in U.S. legislative proposals. But they remain contentious, with features and differences that leave the underlying welfare rationale and implications unclear. Exploring...

This paper is concerned with the question as to what extent population size and density affect the cost of providing public services at the subnational level. Empirical estimates of cost functions are obtained from an analysis of the expenditures of German states disaggregated into about 40...