We test the hypothesis that the flypaper effect can arise if the recipient government finances part of its expenditures with a distortionary tax. We present a simple theoretical framework that shows how a lump-sum transfer stimulates the marginal expenditures of a recipient government through an...

Disputes over the marginal cost of public funds may be about its magnitude in any given time and place or about its role in cost-benefit analysis. This paper is about the latter. The Samuelson rule was devised for an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent government. This paper is about how the...

The marginal cost of public funds is the equilibrium price at the intersection of the appropriately-defined demand curve for and the supply curve of public expenditure. In a world with identical people and with no excess burden of taxation, that price would have to be 1. Otherwise the median...

The paper uses an applied general equilibrium model, calibrated to the situation in Belgium in 1990, to evaluate the welfare effects of small policy changes in the presence of transport externalities. The model incorporates three types of externalities: congestion, which has a feedback effect on...

This paper reviews the relationship, or lack of it, between two bodies of literature dealing, respectively, with cost-benefit analysis and the marginal cost of public funds (MCF). It argues that, while there are no simple answers to the question of how, or to what extent, different methods of...

There still seems to be some confusion about the consequences of normalisations in the optimal taxation literature. We claim that:1) Normalisations do not matter for the real solution of optimal taxation problem.2) Normalisations do matter for good characterisations of the solutions to optimal...

A lump-sum intergovernmental transfer has a "price effect", as well as an "income effect", because it allows the recipient government to reduce its tax rate, which lowers its marginal cost of public funds, while still providing the same level of public service. This reduction in the effective...

The authors extend the Ahmad and Stern (1984) framework for calculating the marginal cost of public funds (MCF) for excise taxes in Thailand by incorporating non-tax distortions caused by (a) environmental externalities, (b) public expenditure externalities, (c) market power in setting prices,...

In this note we discuss how to treat taxes in a cost-benefit analysis (CBA). In particular we relate the shadow price of taxes in CBA to the concepts the marginal cost of public funds MCPF) and the marginal excess burden (MEB) of taxes. In particular we demonstrate that the MCPF is equal to one...

This working paper computes the marginal cost of public funds associated with the reform of the Spanish Personal Income Tax, in force since 1999. Departing from a partial equilibrium framework, we simulate the reform using the working population of the Spanish wave of the European Community...