This article describes the evolution and key features of the centralized environmental regulatory systems that emerged in the United States and Europe during the latter half of the twentieth century. It applies insights from the positive economic analysis of regulatory centralization in an...

The growing prospect of comprehensive national climate change legislation raises many important questions about the role of state efforts in a national climate change program. This article identifies the key state/federal issues that should be addressed in any comprehensive national...

This paper, written shortly after the Ninth Circuit upheld the constitutionality of the Northwest Planning Council, which Congress authorized to implement the Northwest Power Act, analyzed the court's decision. The paper reviewed the unsuccessful attempts to challenge the Council (thereby...

Interstate environmental harms, which occur when decisions or actions in one state produce negative environmental impacts in another state, have challenged environmental law and American federalism for over a century. While even the strongest advocates of state primacy in environmental policy...

In this paper, we take up the question why a group of sovereign countries is willing to form a federation even if residents of the high-income region suspect potential immigrants to be net beneficiaries of the tax and transfer system. We argue that income uncertainty alone cannot satisfactorily...

This paper provides a political-economy explanation of the degree of centralization in economic policy making. To determine which policies are to be centralized, regions select representatives who then negotiate the degree of centralization and the regional cost shares of centrally decided...

This paper investigates how the abolishment of a ban on tuition fees affects the quality of higher education with centralized and decentralized decision making. It is shown that tuition fees fully crowd public funds under centralization and quality of university education does not improve....

The European Union (EU) is not de jure a federation, but after 50 years of institutional evolution it possesses attributes of a federal state. One can conclude that EU is something between federation and intergovernmental organization. If we measure something between by interval [0, 1], where 0...

Sicherheitsthemen sind ein klassisches Feld der politischen Auseinandersetzung in Demokratien - im deutschen Fall spielt dabei die föderale Prägung eine entscheidende Rolle. Der vorliegende Beitrag ist ein erster Versuch, die politische Positionierung von Parteien in Deutschland im Bereich...