I study a model of geopolitical organization endogenizing the size of nations, of their public spending and of their degree of openness. The optimal geography may not be a stable equilibrium and the Alesina-Spolaore bias toward too many nations tends to be confirmed. However, multiple equilibria...

This paper shows how a popular system of federal revenue equalization grants can limit tax competition among subnational governments, correct fiscal externalities, and increase government spending. Remarkably, an equalization grant can implement efficient policy choices by regional governments,...

This paper analyses the optimal taxation of dividends and other types of income from portfolio investment. We show that, in an open economy, it is not desirable to offer double taxation relief for dividends paid by domestic firms to domestic households. This result holds for fairly general...

Large and growing levels of public debt in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and the Euro Area raise new interest in the cross-country effects of a large open economy's deficits. We consider a dynamic optimising model with costly tax collection and exogenously given public spending and...

We examine the effect of population size on government size for a panel of 130 countries for the period between 1970 and 2014. We show that previous analyses of the nexus between population size and government size are incorrectly specified and fail to consider the influence of cross-sectional...

This paper considers liberalization of trade in both inter-temporal intermediation services and goods in a joint spatial-inter-temporal trade model. Joint multi-commodity spatial intertemporal models are not (to our knowledge) used in the trade literature as general comparative statics results...

We combine a model of combined inter-spatial and inter-temporal trade between countries recently used by Huang, Whalley and Zhang (2004) to analyze the merits of trade liberalization in services when goods trade is restricted with a model of foreign exchange rationing due to Clarete and Whalley...

Despite the growing concern about actual on-going climate change, there is little consensus about the scale and timing of actions needed to stabilise the concentrations of greenhouse gases. Many countries are unwilling to implement effective mitigation strategies, at least in the short-term, and...

People’s value for their own time is a key input in evaluating public policies: evaluations should account for time taken away from work or leisure as a result of policy. Using rich choice data collected from farming households in western Kenya, we show that households exhibit non-transitive...

We examine the impact of government size on economic fluctuations and the role of fiscal policy in promoting macroeconomic stability in the period 1980-2024. The results indicate that indirect taxes, capital taxes, and social security contributions (as a percentage of GDP) are associated with...