Contrary to conventional wisdom about an environmental race to the bottom, the theoretical literature as exemplified by Oates and Schwab [1988, Journal of Public Economics, 35:333–354] maintains that homogeneous jurisdictions’ decentralized choices are likely to be socially optimal because...

One consequence of decentralized responsibility to set tax policy and environmental standards is that local governments might try to attract industry and jobs by underproviding local public goods with lower taxes or lax environmental standards or both. But if local authorities exploit fixed...

An important public policy question that remains unresolved is whether environmental standards are best set centrally or locally. At the center of the debate is whether devolution can induce jurisdictions of a federation to “race to the bottom” in pursuit of industry and jobs. A widely cited...

How do firms in nonrenewable resource industries respond to changes in state taxes? This paper presents simulations of changes in state production (severance) tax policy on the timing of exploration and output in Wyoming. The framework developed allows for interactions between taxes levied by...

This study examines the role of pre-election perceptions of race closeness, by way of newspaper polls, in motivating citizens to vote on a specific contest while in the voting booth. Results from an error components model (random effects), employing state panel data of concurrent gubernatorial...

This paper develops a dynamic empirical framework that can be used to test the effectiveness of state-level severance tax incentives in the U.S. oil industry. The framework embeds U.S. state-level panel data estimates into Pindyck's (1978) widely received theoretical model of exhaustible...