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...

Much has been said and written about the ‘fiscal behaviour' of multinationals. A tax code of conduct is often mentioned as a 'catch-all solution' for stimulating 'acceptable fiscal behaviour'. Stakeholders increasingly demand fiscal accountability to obtain verifiable and validated credible...

We show that federalism will lead to higher economic growth. We present a model of endogenous growth where government services, funded by income and capital taxes, are a component of production. In this model a decentralized government will choose tax policy to maximize economic growth, while a...

We study how to efficiently motivate policy-makers to solve political multitask problems. Political multi-task problems typically have outcomes that are difficult to measure. Moreover, there are conflicts among citizens about optimal policies and the agents have the power to tax the citizens to...

This paper is the first to examine the effects of tax and expenditure limitations (TELs) on charitable activities benefiting public schools. Because TELs aim to reduce state budgets, TEL adoption may induce voluntary collective action at the local level. This paper employs a quasi-experimental...

Using the self-selection approach to tax analysis within an OLG framework, the paper examines optimal non-linear labour and capital income taxation and the provision of a durable public good. Under endogenous wages, the marginal tax rules depend on the influence of the tax instruments on...

We examine whether and how democratic procedures can achieve socially desirable public good provision in the presence of profound uncertainty about the benefits of public goods, i.e., when citizens are able to identify the distribution of benefits only if they aggregate their private...

When comparing marginal costs and benefits of a public project, most economists think in terms of adding together the marginal costs of production plus marginal costs of additional distortionary taxation. This paper clarifies how the "revenue effect" offsets the "distortionary effect." For...

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...

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...