Federal and state governments often differ in the capacity to pre-commit to expenditure and tax policy. Whether the implied sequence of public decisions has any efficiency implications is the subject of this paper. We resort to a setting which contrary to most of the literature does not exhibit...

The "Decentralization Theorem" [Oates, W.E., 1972. Fiscal Federalism. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York] is central to the discussion of fiscal federalism. We revisit the role of consumption spillovers in evaluating the merits of (de)centralization. Unlike the general prediction, a higher...

A benchmark result in public economics is that it is possible to increase both tax revenue and welfare by making a monopoly subject to ad valorem taxes rather than unit taxes. We show that such revenue and welfare dominance does not hold in two-sided markets.

This paper considers the relationship between tax competition and growth in an endogenous growth model where there are stochastic shocks to productivity, and capital taxes fund a public good which may be for final consumption or an infrastructure input. Absent stochastic shocks, decentralized...

Corporate tax systems generally maintain a sharp distinction between debt and equity, however, the advent of hybrid instruments has transformed the universe offinancial instruments into a debt-equity continuum and tax systems therefore need to draw lines that distinguish the set of debt...

This paper provides an analysis of competition for migrants. Competing in taxes (transfers) renders migration flows less (more) elastic with respect to changes in fiscal policy. Jurisdictions with aligned preferences (i.e. jurisdictions that maximize the interest of the same type of households,...

Two-sided platform firms serve distinct customer groups that are connected through interdependent demand, and include major businesses such as the media industry, banking, and the software industry. A well known result of tax incidence is that consumers of a more heavily taxed good pay a higher...

One of the stylized facts of unfunded social security programs is that programs are larger in size, measured relative to the GDP, the tighter the link between pension claims and past earnings. We provide a political economy explanation of this stylized fact in a median voter model, where people...

Previous literature concludes that replacing wage taxation by taxes on a fixed factor or its rents benefits future generations. However, the effects of such steady-state gains on the transition generations have been left open. In this paper, we show that taxation of rents may also increase...

We show that taxation of rents may yield an intergenerational Pareto-improvement in a small open economy provided tax revenues are earmarked to reduce wage taxes. Previous literature has shown that rent taxation benefits current young and future generations, while we show that it also benefits...