We consider a country whose government provides a bundle of goods and services through a multi-tier administrative organization. We compare the optimal architectures of public governance (i.e. the division of the state into several tiers, the distribution of services among them, their number of...

This paper analyzes mergers of regions in a two-tier setting with both horizontal and vertical tax competition. The merger of regions induces three effects on regional and local tax policies, which are transmitted both horizontally and vertically: i) an alleviation of tax competition at the...