Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Federalism as Creative Politics -- 2. Federalism, Public Goods, and Taxes -- 3. Representatives' Positions and Collective Decisions -- 4. Read Our Lips, No New (Income) Taxes -- 5. Tax and Spend or Spending Taxes- Economic Development in the States --...

In many cases the optimal open-loop policy to influence agents who solve dynamic problems is time-inconsistent. We show how to construct a time-consistent open-loop policy rule. We also consider an additional restriction under which the time-consistent open-loop policy is stationary. We use...

This paper illustrates how one can use causal effects of a policy change to measure its welfare impact without decomposing them into income and substitution effects. Often, a single causal effect suffices: the impact on government revenue. Because these responses vary with the policy in...

We study the dynamic taxation of capital and labor in the Ramsey model under the assumption that taxes and public good provision are decided by a self-interested politician who cannot commit to policies. We show that, as long as the discount factor of the politician is equal to or greater than...

We provide a quantitative assessment of the welfare cost of tax competition or, equivalently, the welfare benefit of international tax policy cooperation. We use a simple multi-country general equilibrium model of a world economy, in which there are two types of cross-country spillovers: the...

The paper studies in a simple, Downsian model of political competition how the private provision of public goods is affected when it is embedded in a system of democracy and redistributive taxation. Results show that the positive effect of inequality on public goods production, which Olson...

In this paper we introduce flexible majority decision rules where the size of the majority depends on the proposal made by the agenda setter. Flexible majority rules can mitigate the disadvantages of democracies in the provision of public projects. In many cases, the combination of the...