Previous literature has shown that public provision of private goods can be a welfare-enhancing device in second-best settings where governments pursue redistributive goals.However, three issues have so far been neglected. First, the case for supplementing an optimal nonlinear income tax with...

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Federalism as Creative Politics -- 2. Federalism, Public Goods, and Taxes -- 3. Representatives' Positions and Collective Decisions -- 4. Read Our Lips, No New (Income) Taxes -- 5. Tax and Spend or Spending Taxes- Economic Development in the States --...

We study, theoretically and empirically, the effects of incentives on the self-selection and coordination of motivated agents to produce a social good. Agents join teams where they allocate effort to either generate individual monetary rewards (selfish effort) or contribute to the production of...

This note discusses the medical/therapeutical responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and their “political economy” context. First, the very quick development of several vaccines highlights the richness of the basic knowledge waiting for therapeutical exploitation. Such knowledge has largely...

Poorer countries have a much smaller public sector and correspondingly a smaller tax burden than richer countries, yet, their economic performance has not been necessarily better. Using a simple model, this paper suggests that the growth and welfare effects of taxation are mediated through...

Attempts to measure the capitalization of local taxes into property prices, starting with Oates (1969), have suffered from a lack of local public service controls. We revisit this vast literature with a novel dataset of 947 time-varying local characteristic and public service controls for all...

Evaluation of amenities and benefits of public service broadcasting is crucially important with the accelerated convergence of broadcasting and telecommunications and the increasing heterogeneities of media use by individuals. With the use of the microdata provided from a survey carried out by...