Empirical evidence suggests that people dislike ads in media products like TV programs. In such situations standard economic theory prescribes that the advertising volume can be optimally reduced by levying a tax on ads. However, making use of recent advances in the theory of Industrial...

Federal and state governments often differ in the capacity to pre-commit to expenditure and tax policy. Whether the implied sequence of public decisions has any efficiency implications is the subject of this paper. We resort to a setting which contrary to most of the literature does not exhibit...

This paper analyzes whether changes in the timing of equalizing transfers to state governments necessitate an adjustment in federal corrective policy. According to the existing literature (assuming an ex-ante choice of transfers), the corrective grant is equal to the marginal damage/benefit...

Federal fiscal arrangements are argued to give rise to tacit collusion among competing Leviathans (Brennan and Buchanan, The Power to Tax, CUP, 1980). Though frequently encountered in academic and policy discussions, the cartelization hypothesis has rarely been scrutinized formally. This paper...

This paper analyzes the relation between tax competition and fiscal equalization. In particular, it asks the question whether fiscal equalization schemes can mitigate inefficient tax competition. Two transfer schemes are considered: tax revenue and tax base equalization schemes. The paper shows...

Previous literature concludes that replacing wage taxation by taxes on a fixed factor or its rents benefits future generations. However, the effects of such steady-state gains on the transition generations have been left open. In this paper, we show that taxation of rents may also increase...

This paper shows that consumers may buy more of a taxed good if it is sold by a two-sided platform firm. Two-sided platform industries serve distinct customer groups that are connected through interdependent demand, and include major businesses such as the media industry (newspapers/magazines...

In this contribution we are exploring to which extent municipalities depend on transfers and financing through debt. Answering this question allows us to draw conclusions about the capacity of municipalities to adapt their fiscal policy in response to unexpected fiscal shocks to municipal...

Conventional wisdom has it that proportional representation leads to more coalition governments and so to greater government spending, especially in redistributive categories favoured by special-interest groups. In contrast, we show in a theoretical model that first-past-the-post systems of...

Intro -- Series Foreword -- Introduction -- 1 - Privatizing Network Industries -- 2 - Network Utilities in the United States: Sector Reforms without Privatization -- 3 - Privatization in Austria: Some Theoretical Reasons and Performance Measures -- 4 - Privatization in Denmark, 1980-2002 -- 5 -...