This paper considers the optimal taxation of transactions services in a dynamic general equilibrium setting, where households use both cash and costly transactions services provided by banks to purchase consumption goods. With a full set of all tax instruments, the optimal tax structure is...

This paper provides a simple political agency model to explain the effect of political alignment between different tiers of government on intergovernmental grants and election outcomes. Key features of the model are: (i) rational voters interpret public good provision as a signal of incumbent...

This paper investigates whether OECD countries compete with each other over corporation taxes, and whether such competition can explain the fall in statutory tax rates in the 1980s and 1990s. We develop a model in which multinational firms choose their capital stock in response to an effective...

This paper looks at the consequences of introducing employment adjustment costs into two standard models of trade unions--the right-to-manage model and the efficient-bargain model. The authors look at how unions affect both the speed of adjustment to equilibrium and the long-run equilibrium....

This paper presents a two-party model of fiscal and debt policy in which the parties do not care about policy outcomes when out of office. Unlike other models of this type, the authors' model has predictions that are largely consistent with existing empirical findings about partisan and...

This article analyses hard and soft budget constraints in a federation, where there is a moral hazard problem between the central and the regional governments. Regional governments can avoid a bailout from the center by exerting costly effort. In this setting, a hard budget constraint is not...

Almost unknown in 1960, the value added tax (VAT) is now found in more than 130 countries, raises around 20 percent of the world’s tax revenue, and has been the centerpiece of tax reform in many developing countries. This paper explores the causes and consequences of the remarkable rise of the...

This paper studies the relationship between fiscal decentralization and electoral accountability, by analyzing how decentralization impacts upon incentive and selection effects, and thus on voter welfare. The effect of fiscal centralization on voter welfare works through two channels: (i) via...