State borders create a discontinuous tax treatment of retail sales. In a Nash game, local tax rates will be higher on the low-state-tax side of a border. Local taxes will decrease from the nearest high-tax border and increase from the low-tax border. Using driving time from state borders and all...

This paper assesses the impacts of the 2017 tax reform act on U.S. competitiveness in terms of changes in incentives for U.S. domestic corporate investment and the taxation of U.S.-headquartered companies and their foreign subsidiaries relative to foreign-headquartered companies. The reduction...

This paper quantifies the unequal welfare effects of tax competition. I derive the optimal tax and transfer schedules in a free mobility union composed of countries that can either compete or set a uniform federal tax rate. In the absence of fiscal coordination, governments internalize that any...

Without participation of the United States, the world?s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, mitigation of global climate change seems hardly conceivable. Despite the U.S. rejection of the Kyoto Protocol and the reluctance of the Bush administration to engage in Post-Kyoto negotiations, recent...

This paper describes a new, industry-adjusted index of state environmental compliance costs from 1977 to 1994. The index has two principal advantages: it controls for states' industrial compositions, and it can be calculated for 17 years, thus facilitating comparisons both among states and...

Most studies of tax competition and the race to the bottom focus on potential host countries competing for mobile capital, neglecting the role of corporate tax planning and of home governments that facilitate this planning. This neglect in part reflects the narrow view frequently taken of the...

This paper develops new measures of environmental costs and local revenue capacity as the basis for a new municipal aid formula in Massachusetts. On the cost side, unlike previous studies, we quantify the effects on local non-school spending of characteristics related to uncontrollable costs. On...

This paper designs a new equalization-aid formula based on fiscal gaps of local communities. Using conceptual analysis and simulations with Massachusetts data, the authors illustrate the tradeoffs that policymakers face in deciding on the policy variables in the formula and lay out several...

Secondary schools in the developed world differ in the degree of differentiation and in the first age of selection of pupils into different tracks. In this paper, we account for the heterogeneity of tracking time with a simple stochastic model which conjugates the returns from specialization...