The government and a non-governmental organization (NGO) can invest in the provision of a public good. Who should be the owner of the public project? In an incomplete contracting model in which ex post negotiations are without frictions, the party that values the public good most should be the...

Over the past few years, policymakers have argued that everything from Apple's Irish tax deal to patent boxes to the LuxLeaks tax rulings represent “harmful tax competition.” Despite the ubiquity of this term, however, there is no internationally accepted definition of so-called harmful tax...

This paper considers an endogenous growth model with public capital and government debt. In setting the level of public investment each period, the government is assumed to follow two fiscal rules that are commonly used in the growth literature: public investment is either equal to a constant...

An extensively studied model of public goods provision implies that government donations to charity crowd out private donations dollar-for-dollar. Field studies fail to verify this result. Several analysts argue that the problem lies with the specification of donor preferences. We report on a...

Although most individuals recognize the necessity of taxation, few like to pay taxes. Governments face costs to collect taxes; people expend resources to legally avoid taxation. Such expenditure represents social waste, as it is a form of rent-seeking. Since there is a market for tax planning...

We propose a model of sharing of public services among local governments. Our model is an application of Nicolo et al. (2023) and combines features of two models: assignment games (Shapley and Shubik (1971)) and the division problem (Sprumont (1991)). We provide an algorithm (The Simple SAM)...

Recent macro developments in the euro area have highlighted the interactions between fiscal policy, sovereign debt, and financial fragility. We take a structural macroeconomic model with frictions in the financial intermediation process, in line with recent research, but introduce asset choice...