The paper shows that a comparison of the appropriately-weighted sum of households' marginal willingness to pay for a public good with the net effect of the increased supply of the public good on shadow, as distinct from actual, government revenue is a generally valid rule for public good...

This paper studies constitutional restrictions on the tax base that protect future generations from expropriation and improve the optimality of investment in Intergenerational Public Goods (IPGs). The choice of the tax base matters because it affects how intergenerational (IG) spillovers are...

We provide a quantitative assessment of the welfare cost of tax competition or, equivalently, the welfare benefit of international tax policy cooperation. We use a simple multi-country general equilibrium model of a world economy, in which there are two types of cross-country spillovers: the...

This paper models tax competition between two countries that are divided into regions. In the first stage of the game, the strategy variable for each country is the division of the provision of a continuum of public goods between the central and regional governments. In the second stage, the...

This paper investigates whether OECD countries compete with each other for mobile factors by using various fiscal (tax-spending) policy instruments. We use a panel dataset of 20 OECD countries over the 1982-2000 period. There is evidence that international capital inflows (FDI) are affected by...

We construct a unifying model of optimal decentralized policymaking that includes multiple tax and spending policies with mobile workers, mobile residents, and mobile capital. Local governments are atomistic with respect to the world capital market, but are linked by commuting patterns, the cost...

The paper delineates three debates, which will be conflated: One line of discussion relates to public goods at transnational level. Here, the referencing of debates regarding the characteristics of “a common good” will be of significance. A second strand addresses the group of countries...

Tax justice and principles underpinning the international tax regime are in vogue. The idea that companies and individuals need to pay their "fair share", not just in the domestic sense but also the international sense, is now a mainstream position. This paper explores the problems relating to...

This paper analyzes the effects of immigration by skill on the outcome of a majority vote among natives on both the size and the composition of public spending. Public spending can be of two types, spending on rival goods (transfers) and on nonrival goods (public goods). I find that the effect...