Earmarked federal grants are ubiquitous and significant. Traditional fiscal federalism is unable to explain the widespread utilization of such grants. Recent arguments focusing on the potential benefits of centralized earmarking in reducing incentives for the creation of soft budgets at...

In a federation featuring decentralized leadership, regional governments compete by setting capital taxes in anticipation of the central government's fiscal-equalization and income-redistribution policies. As a benchmark, it is first demonstrated that the constrained socially optimal allocation...

In a federation with decentralized leadership, many regional governments provide multiple types of public goods and the center implements interregional income transfers. The symmetric perfect equilibrium under unlimited decentralized leadership is inefficient because regional public goods are...

This paper offers a theoretical model for the analysis of illegal cartels. Given the nature of the cartel, retaliation is also illegal. To assess the stability of collusion as a criminal organization, we propose a one-shot game based on Bertrand competition with product differentiation. We...

In a family context with endogenous timing, multiple public goods and alternative parental instruments, we show that the optimal timing for the sequential-action game played by rotten kids and a parent depends crucially on whether the kids are homogeneous or heterogeneous. For homogeneous kids,...

This study compares energy and emission taxes used to control pollution and provide incentives for the adoption of an advanced abatement technology in a Cournot oligopoly. We examine multistage games where the government may intervene in order to maximize social welfare by setting an...

This paper examines the problem of costly exclusion of individuals from a public good. Previous analyses of exclusion have treated it as solely a question of technologies; in our analysis exclusion depends on technology and incentives. In this paper providers of the good design a mechanism to...

In a domestic market, a duopoly produces a homogeneous final good, pollution, pollution abatement and R&D. One of the firms (foreign) has superior technology. The government regulates the duopoly by levying a pollution tax to maximize domestic welfare. We consider the potential implementation of...

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...

We study the effects of environmental policy commitments in a futuristic world in which solar radiation management (SRM) can be utilized to reduce climate change damages. Carbon and sulfur dioxide emissions (correlated pollutants) can be reduced through tradable permits. We show that if both...