Our study compares the efficiency of unemployment insurance programs in a state union. A centralized insurance pools the cost of unemployment which implies a collective bargaining in the countries that leads to excessively high wages and inefficient insurance. Those high wages attract workers...

Our study compares the efficiency of centralized and decentralized unemployment insurance programs in a state union. We use a model of two countries with collective bargaining for regional gross wages. The labor force and the firms are partially mobile across the member states of the state...

Our study compares the efficiency of centralized and decentralized unemployment insurance programs in a state union. We use a model of two countries with collective bargaining for regional gross wages. The labor force and the firms are partially mobile across the member states of the state...

I examine the relatively rapid adoption of state lotteries over the past 30 years within a public choice context to determine why some states implement lotteries and others do not. Without trying to explain why people gamble, I argue that legislatures use the lottery to tax federal welfare...

The literature on horizontal tax interdependencies offered limited attention to the interactions on administrative policies although they play an important role in determining the total tax revenues collected. The incentive for sub-central tax authorities to share relevant taxpayer-specific...

We develop a political economy model of intergovernmental transfers. Vertical fiscal balance occurs in a federation when the ratio of the marginal benefit of the public services provided by the federal and provincial governments is equal to their relative marginal costs of production. With...

In this paper, we model a federal economy where perfectly mobile labour supply is taxed on an ad valorem basis by the federal as well as lower-level (state) governments. We find that either under- or overtaxation occurs, under similar conditions as in Keen and Kotsogiannis (2002, 2004). However,...

This paper derives an efficient intergovernmental transfer system within tax competition settings under the endogenization of the number of regions that engage in tax competition. In our theoretical model, two externalities arise. These include fiscal externalities and the externalities...

Sub-national governments often finance substantial parts of their budgets via taxes on capital or other mobile factors – despite having access to alternative, less distortionary, revenue sources. This paper develops three hypotheses to explain this pattern and tests them in a natural...

Recent literature has emphasized that redistributive grant systems may tend to internalize fiscal externalities arising from tax competition. This paper further explores the conditions under which local grant systems enforced by the state government will enhance efficiency. A system of...