In many countries organized as federations, fiscal-equalization schemes have been implemented to mitigate vertical or horizontal imbalances. Such schemes usually imply that the member states of the federation can only partly internalize marginal tax revenue before redistribution. Aside from this...

Voters dealing with jurisdictional merger decisions face a trade-off between economies of scale and preference costs. Larger jurisdictions may offer cost advantages, yet the downside is that policies in larger units may be less aligned to voter preferences. Our study is the first to provide...

Concurrent taxation is a feature of many federal systems. As a consequence of this fact, the tax policy of one level of government affects the tax base of the other. This paper carries out a theoretical analysis of the interdependent tax-setting decisions of federal and regional governments,...

In the context of EMU fiscal equalization schemes have been proposed as a means to stabilize regions against asymmetric shocks. A theoretical analysis shows that besides reducing the cross-sectional income variance the redistributive element of fiscal equalization causes incentive effects for...

The paper considers governments' public procurement decision as a way of influencing industry structure. In a federation in which capital is mobile and capital taxation is harmonized, a home bias in public procurement can potentially be explained as an effort to increase the capital intensity of...

We analyze the optimal allocation of authority in an organization whose members have conflicting preferences. One party has decision-relevant private information, and the party who obtains authority decides in a self-interested way. As a novel element in the literature on decision rights, we...