Sub-national governments often finance substantial parts of their budgets via taxes on capital or other mobile factors - despite having access to alternative, less distortionary, revenue sources. This paper develops three hypotheses to explain this pattern and tests them in a natural experiment...

We analyze the strategic interaction of regional and federal governments using a model that includes fiscal externalities in the form of inter-regional capital tax competition and technical externalities in the form of inter-regional spillovers. The federal government aims to correct for these...

We propose a theory of tax centralization and inter governmental grants in politico-economic equilibrium. The cost of taxation differs across levels of government because voters internalize general equilibrium effects at the central but not at the local level. This renders the degree of tax...

Prevailing accounts of the efficiency of subsidies for the nonprofit sector presume that the only alternative source of public goods is a single sovereign, controlled by a single median voter. Tiebout sorting, however, also provides citizens with alternative bundles of public goods. When these...

We study tax evasion and decentralized tax enforcement in a federal economy with mobile capital and the endogenous formation of multiregional companies. Regions use their enforcement policy as a strategic instrument to engage in fiscal competition. Within this framework, we analyze the...

I examine the relatively rapid adoption of state lotteries over the past 30 years within a public choice context to determine why some states implement lotteries and others do not. Without trying to explain why people gamble, I argue that legislatures use the lottery to tax federal welfare...

Recent literature has emphasized that redistributive grant systems may tend to internalize fiscal externalities arising from tax competition. This paper further explores the conditions under which local grant systems enforced by the state government will enhance efficiency. A system of...

This article determines the conditions under which the Southern countries should act together, or separately, while negotiating with the North about climate change policy and about the conditions for future Southern engagement. The paper models the international negotiations with complete and...