We develop an endogenous growth model with public consumption and infrastructure services provided by two-tier governments. Growth performance and welfare implication are compared under the centralized and decentralized fiscal federal systems. In general, there is a trade-off between welfare and...

We develop a model of policy experimentation in federal systems in which heterogeneous districts choose both whether to experiment and the policies to experiment with. The prospect of informational spillovers implies that in the fi rst best the districts converge in their policy choice....

On the European level, a variety of different coordination mechanisms are used in different areas of economic policy. The spectrum ranges from complete centralization as in the case of monetary policy to weak forms of coordination like the so-called open coordination in social policy fields. The...