The phenomenon of private contributions to public goods is broadly discussed in the literature. However, the possibility to verify theoretical results empirically is often limited because sufficient data on donors is lacking. Christmas lights in Berlin have been completely financed with private...

In many federations, fiscal equalization schemes soften fiscal imbalances across the member states. Such schemes usually imply that a member state internalizes only a small fraction of the additional tax revenue from an expansion of the state-specific tax base, while the remainder of the...