Borders create a discontinuous tax treatment of retail sales. In a Nash game, equilibrium local tax rates will be higher on the low-tax side of a border. Taxes will decrease from the nearest high-tax border and increase from the nearest low-tax border. Using driving time from state borders and...

This paper focusses on the relationship between subnational fiscal autonomy, transport infrastructure investment and regional disparities in 30 OECD countries over the period 1995-2011. Subnational fiscal autonomy is approximated by the revenue share of autonomous taxes. A fixed effects panel...

In the literature on urban studies, the size distribution of cities has been attributed to a random growth process where transportation externalities, congestion costs, and capital formation all play a crucial role. However, the classic economics models do not fully capture the impact of...

We develop a tax competition model that allows for the setting of both an origin-based and a destination-based commodity tax rate in the presence of avoidance and evasion. In the presence of evasion, jurisdictions will give cross-border shoppers tax preferential treatment, thus not fully...

Growing regional inequality within countries has raised the perception that 'someplaces and people' are left behind. This has prompted a shift toward inward-looking policies andaway from pro-growth reforms. This paper presents novel stylized facts on regional inequality forOECD countries. It...

Using a nationwide county-level panel dataset for the years 1995-2009, this paper conducts the first analysis in the literature to examine the impacts of fiscal decentralization and fiscal equalization, both measured at the sub-provincial level, on intra-provincial inequality in China. While...

This paper examines the role of political alignment and the electoral business cycle on municipality revenues in Greece for the period 2003-2010. A panel dataset combining local and national elections with local budgets is used to run a fixed-effects econometric model. The findings suggest that...

Die deutsche Energiewende steht sowohl „von oben“ als auch „von unten“ unter Druck: Verfechter einer dezentralen Energiewende sehen letztere wegen jüngster Änderungen bei der Förderpolitik für Strom aus erneuerbaren Energien in Gefahr, während andererseits eine stärkere...

This paper analyses the case of a local secession, i.e. the birth of a new local jurisdiction by separation from an existing one. We present a stylized model in which society is composed of heterogeneous groups and individuals have an homophily bias. The model predicts that: i) separations, such...