An unfunded expenditure mandate occurs when a local government must provide a good or service by dictate of a higher level of government that does not supply an accompanying revenue source to fully finance the expenditure. This paper is the first to provide empirical evidence on the influence of...

We extend the literature on local income tax competition by allowing for inter-jurisdictional spillovers and imperfect rivalry in consumption of a publicly provided good. Comparing decentralized second-best results of a theoretical model with an efficient benchmark, we identify three...

We study the strategic incentives of regional governments to allocate their budget to public investment and to public consumption expenditures against the background of an incentive-compatible redistribution policy set by the central government. Regional investment changes the productivity...

The paper reconsiders the theory of fiscal federalism in a framework inspired by property-rights theory. We set up a two-period model where on a first stage a region in a federation can expend value-enhancing investments into a public project. The project can be implemented on a second stage,...

We analyze the strategic interaction of regional and federal governments using a model that includes fiscal externalities in the form of inter-regional capital tax competition and technical externalities in the form of inter-regional spillovers. The federal government aims to correct for these...

The theoretical literature on the economics of fiscal federalism has identified several potential effects of government decentralization on economic growth. Much of the traditional literature focuses on the efficiency aspects of a decentralized provision of public services. However,...

We consider a country whose government provides a bundle of goods and services through a multi-tier administrative organization. We compare the optimal architectures of public governance (i.e. the division of the state into several tiers, the distribution of services among them, their number of...

We investigate whether politicians award intergovernmental grants to core supporters. Our new dataset contains information on discretionary project grants from a German state government to municipalities over the period 2008-2011. The results show that discretionary grants were awarded to...

In fiscal interaction, a policy is evolutionarily stable if, once adopted by all governments, jurisdictions that deviate from it fare worse than those that stick to it. Evolutionary stability is the appropriate solution concept for models of imitative learning (policy mimicking). We show that...