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Home / Dirk Niepelt / “Fiscal Federalism, Grants, and the U.S. Fiscal Transformation in the 1930s” UoCH, 2017

“Fiscal Federalism, Grants, and the U.S. Fiscal Transformation in the 1930s” UoCH, 2017

Summary:
University of Copenhagen, Department of Economics Discussion Paper 17-18, July 2017, with Martin Gonzalez-Eiras. PDF. We propose a theory of tax centralization and intergovernmental grants in politico-economic equilibrium. The cost of taxation differs across levels of government because voters internalize general equilibrium effects at the central but not at the local level. The equilibrium degree of tax centralization is determinate even if expenditure-related motives for centralization considered in the fiscal federalism literature are absent. If central and local spending are complements, intergovernmental grants are determinate as well. Our theory helps to explain the centralization of revenue, introduction of grants, and expansion of federal income taxation in the U.S. around the

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University of Copenhagen, Department of Economics Discussion Paper 17-18, July 2017, with Martin Gonzalez-Eiras. PDF.

We propose a theory of tax centralization and intergovernmental grants in politico-economic equilibrium. The cost of taxation differs across levels of government because voters internalize general equilibrium effects at the central but not at the local level. The equilibrium degree of tax centralization is determinate even if expenditure-related motives for centralization considered in the fiscal federalism literature are absent. If central and local spending are complements, intergovernmental grants are determinate as well. Our theory helps to explain the centralization of revenue, introduction of grants, and expansion of federal income taxation in the U.S. around the time of the New Deal. Quantitatively, the model can account for the postwar trend in federal grants, and a third of the dramatic increase in the size of the federal government in the 1930s.

Dirk Niepelt
Dirk Niepelt is Director of the Study Center Gerzensee and Professor at the University of Bern. A research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR, London), CESifo (Munich) research network member and member of the macroeconomic committee of the Verein für Socialpolitik, he served on the board of the Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics and was an invited professor at the University of Lausanne as well as a visiting professor at the Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES) at Stockholm University.

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