This paper analyzes fiscal competition among numerous spatially- separated jurisdictions in an explicitly dynamic framework. The degree of factor mobility between jurisdictions is imperfect because it is costly and time-consuming to adjust factor stocks. Even if it is harmful in the long run,...

Local government tax and service policies, for reasons including tax competition, spillovers of service benefits, and a limited choice of tax instruments, may not be globally efficient. Policies used by state governments to remedy these inefficiencies include matching grants, mandates, and tax...

In a simple model of day care enrollment and labor supply, we have shown that in countries like Sweden where wages are taxed at about 60\%, the government's tax revenue, net of day care subsidies, is likely to be maximized with subsidies covering more than half of day care costs. In contrast, in...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of how the U.S. Social Security and Medicare insurance system affect the labor supply of older males in the presence of incomplete markets for loans, annuities, and health insurance. Using data from the Retirement History Survey, we estimate a detailed...

We will show that in the case where there are two individuals and three alternatives (or under the assumption of free-triple property) the Arrow impossibility theorem for social welfare functions that there exists no social welfare function which satisfies transitivity, Pareto principle,...

Why are trade barriers often used to protect home producers, even at the cost of introducing deadweight losses from higher commodity prices? We add an informational friction to the standard textbook argument in favor of free trade, and show that trade restrictions may be a more effcient policy...

In this paper we examine several dimensions of economic reform in India, in the context of the country’s federal system and of globalization, i.e., we explicitly recognize that the national government has subnational governments below it, and that all these layers of government simultaneously...

This paper presents the National Health Accounts (NHA) methodology and its relevance in policy making in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region. After presenting the concept of NHA and highlighting recent results of LAC data collection activities, the paper will focus on policy...

The relationship between economic growth and the environment is not well understood: we have only limited understanding of the basic science involved and very limited data. Because of these difficulties it is especially important to develop a series of relatively simple theoretical models that...

Social welfare programs strive to improve the well-being of needy and vulnerable populations. The fact that states spend different amounts on these programs is well known, but why they do so is less understood, including the extent to which differences are affected by states’ relative fiscal...