The forced sale of homes for private development usually results in a zero-sum gain and may actually hinder development in the area, economists have found.

We examine the marriage tax in a formal setting. We begin with precise statements of the basic normative principles in the literature and proofs of old and new impossibility claims. Along the way we document and resolve important ambiguities in the existing literature. We then characterize the...

Consider a collection of isolated or autarkic regions. The original residents or natives of each region are by assumption a group with a welfare function defined over group members' consumption. Now suppose the regions form a common labor market and a federal government, and one type from each...

In 2005, Missouri had 53 legally authorized tax credit programs. In this paper, the authors assemble basic information on all of these programs and further analyze the six largest (by tax credits issued) that include freely transferable credits. Their analysis focuses on the institutional...

We define a class of games with discontinuous payoffs that we call shared resource games and establish a pure strategy Nash equilibrium existence theorem for these games. We then apply this result to a canonical game of fiscal competition for mobile capital. Other applications are also...