Both the strengths and weaknesses of the financial condition and competitive position for the State of Connecticut are compared with selected states in the nation. Thus, even while Connecticut state budgets may have been balanced, as required by law, in fact its obligations have exceeded...

Climate change is seen as the most pressing environmental problem of our time by many companies, policymakers and other stakeholders. It is currently also at the forefront of attention in view of attempts to conclude a successor to the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012. In bail-out plans and...

In this paper, we employ a unique tax experiment and dataset in a highly salient tax rate environment to examine consumer response to complex and uncertain tax reforms. Tax reforms raise some fundamental questions in public finance: How does consumption respond to tax change? How is the tax...

The paper studies the political and economic determinants of regional public transfers. Specifically, it focuses on how such transfers are shaped by alternative fiscalconstitutions, where a constitution is an allocation of fiscal instruments across different levels of governments plus a...

We provide empirical estimates of the risksharing and redistributive properties of fiscal equalization among the states of the German federation. Fiscal equalization serves as a mechanism to insure state budgets against asymmetric revenue shocks, but provides almost no insurance against regional...