This paper takes stock of what is known about the efficacy of actual Value Added Tax (VAT) systems, nearly 100 years since the tax was conceived. Existing VAT systems fall short of the idealized version on many dimensions, some by design and others unintended. Actual VATs might therefore have...

How does the fragmentation of local governments affect economic activity? We examine this question in the context of a major period of decentralization in Indonesia in which the number of local governments increased by 50 percent within a decade. Exploiting idiosyncratic variation in the timing...