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...

This paper deals with the issue of how to allocate greenhouse gas emission permits to nations in the long run. The so-called 'equitable' rules to allocate such permits under a global agreement (per capita or grandfathering allocation rules for instance) do not necessarily ensure stability in the...

In this paper we extend the smoothing technique [7], [9] onto the problems of Semidefinite Optimization. For that, we develop a simple framework for estimating a Lipschitz constant for the gradient of some symmetric functions of eigenvalues of symmetric matrices. Using this technique, we can...

The envisaged EU enlargement will lead to a redirection of Structural and Cohesion Funds expenditures from current to new EUmembers. This redistribution of funds makes the accession countries even more attractive as a location of FDI. Using a logistic regressions approach, this paper shows that...

Interjurisdictional flows of imperfectly-mobile migrants, investment, and other productive resources result in the costly dynamic adjustment of resource stocks. This paper investigates the comparative dynamics of adjustment to changes in local fiscal policy with two imperfectly mobile productive...

This paper estimates Nash-type fiscal reaction functions for European governments competing for revenue from diesel excises. It appears that European governments strategically set their excise levels by responding to their neighbors' tax rates. This provides evidence for the presence of tax...

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...

This paper analyzes the relationship between the size of an economic union and the degree of policy centralization. We consider a political economy setting in which elected representatives bargain over the degree of centralization within the union. In our model strategic delegation affects the...

This paper argues that high political competition does not necessarily induce policy makers to perform better as previous research has shown. We develop a political economy model and we show that when political competition is tight, and elected politicians can rely on more tax instruments, they...