Conventional wisdom has it that policy innovation is better promoted in a federal rather than in a unitary system. Recent research, however, has provided theoretical evidence to the contrary: a multi-jurisdictional system is characterized - due to the existence of a horizontal information...

The recent literature has emphasized that government intervention when consumers have quasi-hyperbolic preferences ('bias for the present') over consumption is not welfare-enhancing. This paper introduces a market imperfection (which takes the form of a negative externality) and shows that...