The distribution of public revenues is one of the fundamental elements in the shaping of the system of public finance in any country. The process is difficult from both the political and economic points of view. Also the objective conditions make the ideal distribution impossible and any...

Recent theoretical research suggests that financing sub-national governments’ expenditure out of own revenue sources is linked to more responsible budgeting, because the financial implications of spending decisions then are internalized within a jurisdiction. We test this proposition...

Existing literature on revenue allocation in Nigeria shows more concern for merits and demerits of sharing principles and /or formulae. Several alternatives have been proposed and will continue to be developed to address the unending agitations from beneficiaries. Contrary however, this paper...

This paper studies comprehensive national panel data of local option sales taxes at the monthly frequency. I calculate state-by-month population weighted averages of local sales tax rates. I document ten stylized facts concerning the time series patterns and spatial dynamics of local sales...

As commentators and Congress have recognized, the U.S. system of financing its unemployment insurance program is seriously dysfunctional. Extant reform proposals, however, do not fully diagnose the causes of current failures. In particular, other commentators neglect the role of fiscal myopia in...

We develop a political economy model of intergovernmental transfers. Vertical fiscal balance occurs in a federation when the ratio of the marginal benefit of the public services provided by the federal and provincial governments is equal to their relative marginal costs of production. With...

I examine whether federal intergovernmental grants have a persistent long-term effect on state fiscal policy. A simple theoretical framework is developed based on the median voter model and is structurally estimated based on a 30-year panel of U.S. federal grants and state tax revenues. In both...

This paper derives an efficient intergovernmental transfer system within tax competition settings under the endogenization of the number of regions that engage in tax competition. In our theoretical model, two externalities arise. These include fiscal externalities and the externalities...

This article examines fiscal illusions inpublic finance systems where decentralisation involving the introduction of an independent and autonomous component oflocal government funding brings new problems. It presents a synthesis ofthe findings from a Polish empirical study that set out to...

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...