Earmarked federal grants are ubiquitous and significant. Traditional fiscal federalism is unable to explain the widespread utilization of such grants. Recent arguments focusing on the potential benefits of centralized earmarking in reducing incentives for the creation of soft budgets at...

In a federation featuring decentralized leadership, regional governments compete by setting capital taxes in anticipation of the central government's fiscal-equalization and income-redistribution policies. As a benchmark, it is first demonstrated that the constrained socially optimal allocation...

In a federation with decentralized leadership, many regional governments provide multiple types of public goods and the center implements interregional income transfers. The symmetric perfect equilibrium under unlimited decentralized leadership is inefficient because regional public goods are...

This paper studies the efficiency of decentralized leadership in federations where selfish regional governments provide regional and federal public goods and the benevolent central government implements interregional earmarked and income transfers. Without residential mobility, unlimited...