This paper considers the decentralized funding of public universities in a federation when students and graduates are mobile. In particular, I discuss whether local governments should be given the right to differentiate tuition fees between in-state and out-of-state students. I develop a model...

In a decentralized setting, are policy targets imposed by the central government on local elected officials effective? And when? We address these questions in Italy, where the central government has set a target for childcare coverage at the municipal level for Southern regions since 2007. We...

In some ways, a 2012 symposium on “Dilemmas of State Debt” may seem a bit behind the news curve. At the end of 2010, municipal bond markets were in a deep funk. Analysts predicted that countless municipalities and perhaps one or more of the United States might default on their debt...

The paper is intended to provide a theoretical contribution to the analysis of central government's normative economic policies in a framework where regional provision of goods with negative spillovers, and public goods used to reduce related externalities, are considered. Firstly the range of...

This paper discusses how taxation may affect migration, economic efficiency and income distribution. The institutional framework is a federal system, in which local authorities are responsible for the supply of public services and the financing of these services, and where the central...

The recent, much remarked upon decentralization in Bolivia produced four important changes in the nation's public finances: (1) a sharp fall in the geographic concentration of investment; (2) a sea-change in the uses of investment away from infrastructure towards the social sectors; (3) a...

This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

This article identifies a significant phenomenon in current urban settings, according to which the otherwise unorganized users of government-owned local public goods, such as parks or playgrounds, often engage in informal cooperation and coordination in the on-going operation, maintenance and...

There is a general consensus in considering the public financing for LTC as a suitable proxy of the resources committed to elderly care by each Government. But the preciseness of this approximation depends on the extent to which LTC is representative of elderly care within a country. We...

In this paper, we present a model of a one parent-one child household where parental decisions on labor supply, leisure, and the demand for private and public child care are simultaneously endogenized and intertemporally determined. We characterize the path of the optimal decisions and...