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...

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 --...

The publication of volumes 3 and 4 of the Handbook of Public Economics affords us several opportunities: to address lacunae in the original two volumes of this series, to revisit topics on which there has been substantial new research, and to address topics that have grown in importance. Indeed,...

This second volume of the Handbook of Public Economics is a continuation of volume one, with chapters surveying the literature on both the tax and expenditure areas of public economics. The material presents an up-to-date survey of the field of public economics by those actually doing work on...

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 projekts. In many cases, the combination of the priciples...