Optimal Design of Intergovernmental Grants Under Asymmetric Information

This paper develops a theoretical explanation for why it may be optimal for higher-level governments to pay categorical block grants or closed-ended matching grants to local governments. We consider a federation with two types of local government which differ in the cost of providing public goods. The federal government redistributes between jurisdictions, but cannot observe the type of jurisdiction. In this asymmetric information setting it is shown that the second-best optimum can be decentralized with the help of categorical block grants and closed-ended matching grants, but not with unconditional block grants or open-ended matching grants