This paper sheds light on the heavy financial burden on peasants in China's fiscal decentralization system. Using a political economy framework, this paper explores the tax-farming nature of China's fiscally decentralized system and examines why the system incurs a particularly heavy financial...

In the search for effective pesticide risk management tools, the design of pesticide risk indicators is nowadays receiving increasing attention as a complement to more established regulatory strategies. In the present paper, we apply some recently developed pesticide risk indices and test their...

A movement toward fiscal decentralization is underway in many countries across the world. This movement is partly justified by appeal to the classic argument of Tiebout (1956), who claimed that decentralized provision of public goods allows better fulfillment of diverse individual demands. Many...

We assess whether public sector employees have a stronger inclination to serve others and are more risk averse than employees in the private sector. A unique feature of our study is that we use revealed rather than stated preferences data. Respondents of a large-scale survey were offered a...

In this paper we argue that authorities aid cooperation by means of direct coordination or the enforcement of re-commitment devices such as contract laws.Credible threats of violence allow this role. In a local interaction model, an authority forms if mutually connected individuals with...

Civil servants have a reputation for being lazy. However, people's personal experiences with civil servants frequently run counter to this stereotype. We develop a model of an economy in which workers differ in laziness and in public service motivation, and characterise optimal incentive...

Today’s global world is characterized not only by a high volume of international trade and foreign investment relative to national income, but also by a changed composition of that trade towards a greater fraction of trade in inputs and capital goods and outsourcing of production.. Emphasized...

In this paper, we study the optimal choices of the federal income tax, federal transfers, and local taxes in a dynamic model of capital accumulation and with explicit gamestructure s among multipleprivateage nts, multiplelocal governments, and the federal government. In general, the optimal...

This study of China demonstrates how the allocation of fiscal resources between the central and local governments has affected economic growth since reforms began in the late 1970s. We find that a higher degree of fiscal decentralization of government spending is associated with lower provincial...

This paper extends the Barro (1990) model with single aggregate government spending and one flat income tax to include public expenditures and taxes by multiple levels of government. It derives the rate of endogenous growth and, with both simulations and special examples, examines how that rate...