This paper examines capital tax competition in the presence of an interstate transfer policy without federal commitment. Lack of commitment implies that tax policy is chosen prior to federal transfers. The paper s main result is that ex-post federal policy internalizes horizontal fiscal...

Previous literature widely assumes that taxes are optimized in local public finance while expenditures adjust residually. This paper endogenizes the choice of the optimization variable. In particular, it analyzes how federal policy toward local governments influences the way local governments...

This paper analyzes whether changes in the timing of equalizing transfers to state governments necessitate an adjustment in federal corrective policy. According to the existing literature (assuming an ex-ante choice of transfers), the corrective grant is equal to the marginal damage/benefit...

Firstly, two seemingly unrelated topics of Russian politics are investigated. It is shown that under expected utility maximization the assumptions of an unbiased oil forward market and a risk-acceptant attitude (strictly convex utility function) of president Putin are sufficient to explain...

We explore the implications of trade liberalization in economies with State Owned enterprises (SOEs) and shirking. SOEs are modelled as controlled by the members of the enterprise who determine output and effort levels, while facing output prices and wage rates set by government. Enterprise...

This article attempts to bring consumption into the study of redistributive politics. Analyzing data from 20 OECD countries over the period 1995-2007, I investigate whether factors that allowed lower and middle-income households to sustain their consumption had any impact on governments'...

This paper investigates determinants of informal economic activity. We present an equilibrium model of informality and test its implications using a survey of 48,000 small firms in Brazil. We define informality as tax avoidance; firms in the informal sector avoid tax payments but suffer other...

This paper investigates determinants of informal economic activity. We present an equilibrium model of informality and test its implications using a survey of 48,000 small firms in Brazil. We define informality as tax avoidance; firms in the informal sector avoid tax payments but suffer other...

This paper, written as a contribution to a festchrift in honor of Neil Komesar, subjects his "comparative institutional analysis" (CIA) to a comparative analysis with various other social-scientific approaches to CIA. Neil Komesar is among the very few legal scholars who has taken to heart...

Independent central bankers and judges can both be more usefully viewed as trustees than as agents. A trust is a legal institution with rules set up by a settlor, administered by a trustee on behalf of beneficiaries. Public trustees often are motivated more by Pride, Policy, Place, and Power...