This paper develops a framework that distributes reductions in state aid based on underlying local fiscal health. Under this framework, the state gives smaller aid cuts to communities that are in worse underlying fiscal health and receive less existing aid. This framework therefore provides a...

Fiscal decentralization and intergovernmental fiscal relations reform have become nearly ubiquitous in developing countries. Performance, however, has often been disappointing in terms of both policy formulation and outcomes. The dynamics underlying these results have been poorly researched....

Researchers in a number of fields have explored the question of why people voluntarily comply with the tax laws. The resulting scholarship suggests that a number of factors influence that decision, but the precise role of, and interaction between, those factors continue to be subjects of debate....

Based on an analysis of 3,844 tax treaties, the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and its Commentaries (VCLT), and case law of various domestic and international courts.The current orthodoxy maintains that courts are not required to compare all language texts of a plurilingual treaty but...

Different in more ways than it is possible to easily enumerate, the formation of the United States and the European Union (EU) had a striking similarity of purpose: to increase citizens' welfare by uniting a collection of independent states, each with its own politics, culture, and economy. Of...

Despite the extensive literature on distributive politics, we still lack a theory of how political and fiscal institutions interact to shape the pork‐barrelling ability of national leaders in a federal parliamentary democracy. Focusing on party system attributes and governmental incentives...

Economic segregation has increased over the past half century. The trend of rich localities getting richer while poor localities get poorer is particularly concerning because it limits upward mobility and perpetuates intergenerational income inequality. This Article makes the novel argument that...

This article argues that New York municipalities should integrate land banks into the tax enforcement process to break the unhealthy cycle perpetuated by real estate and lien speculators. By transferring all tax liens and foreclosed properties to local land banks, municipalities can generate an...

This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

This dissertation consists of six self-contained chapters that are related to the behavior of firms and politicians in a broader sense. After an introduction to the topic, the first part of the dissertation elaborates on how institutional and political framework conditions influence the behavior...