A gradually introduced reform of local government accounting made it temporarily possible for municipalities in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia to avoid the effective control of their budget by the authorities in charge of overseeing local government budgets and enforcing the existing...

A gradually introduced reform of local government accounting made it temporarily possible for municipalities in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia to avoid the effective control of their budget by the authorities in charge of overseeing local government budgets and enforcing the existing...

We introduce cross-border shopping and indirect tax competition into a model of optimal taxation. The Atkinson-Stiglitz result that indirect taxation cannot improve the effciency of information-constrained tax-transfer policies, and that indirect taxes should not be differentiated across goods,...

We analyze the optimal regional pattern of public employment in an information constrained second-best redistribution policy showing that regionally differentiated public employment can serve as an expenditure side tagging device, bypassing or relaxing the equity-effciency trade-off. The optimal...