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This paper studies the historical origins of the federalist institutions in Mexico and Brazil. Using a bargaining game model, I argue that the type of commodities each country produced by the end of the nineteenth Century determined the negotiation power of local governments. This led to the buildup of opposite federalist institutions in both countries, which have persisted until nowadays. The model shows that countries with regions with more autonomy to produce and trade their commodities increase the local power to collect more taxes. While in Brazil coffee was the most important commodity, Mexico relied on mining products. Coffee was produced by local landowners who became economically powerful and they were able that export taxes were collected locally with the proclamation of the 1891 Constitution. Empirical estimates show that, after 1891, exporter states increased significantly their own fiscal revenue. On the other hand, mining was capital and technology intensive, inputs that were domestically scarce in Mexico. To finance those activities foreign investment was promoted centrally, weakening the relative power of local elites.

This paper provides evidence from a fragile state that citizens demand more of a voice in the government when it tries to tax them. I examine a field experiment randomizing property tax collection across 356 neighborhoods of a large Congolese city. The tax campaign was the first time most citizens had been registered by the state or asked to pay formal taxes. It raised property tax compliance from 0.1%in control to 11.5% in treatment. It also increased political participation by about 5 percentage points (31%): citizens in taxed neighborhoods were more likely to attend townhall meetings hosted by the government or to submit evaluations of its performance. To participate in these ways, the average citizen incurred costs equal to their daily household income, and treated citizens spent 43% more than control. Treated citizens also positively updated about the provincial government, perceiving more revenue, less leakage, and a greater responsibility to provide public goods. The results suggest that broadening the tax base has a 'participation dividend,' a key idea in historical accounts of the emergence of inclusive governance in early modern Europe and a common justification for donor support of tax programs in weak states.

We construct a political equilibrium in which employers and labour unions bargain over labour contracts, wage-earners and profit-earners lobby the government for taxation and labour market regulation, and labour market legislation must be accepted by the majority of voters. We show that the voters rule out profit sharing, because otherwise the government would capture all the gain. Furthermore, if it is much easier to tax wages than profits, then the government protects union power by regulation in the labour market. In such a case, the political equilibrium is characterized by strong union power and right-to-manage bargaining, which causes involuntary unemployment.

Coase's seminal 1960 paper on externalities is associated with the so-called Coase Theorem which is stated in the literature in many forms. However, its main thrust was less to state a theorem than to challenge Pigou's earlier insistence on the need for government intervention through Pigouvian taxes to achieve internalisation of externalities. Coase argued instead that private party bargaining can be relied upon to internalise externalities, but equally insisted that establishing clear and firm property rights is a precondition to successful internalisation achieving bargaining. Similar thinking has lead to clear definitions of property rights becoming a key part of World Bank conditionality in the environmental area. This paper discusses the underpinnings of this position, arguing that it is little researched and subject to challenge. We first show how Coase only considered one type of property right, and where others such as compensation rights are allowed for the property right assignment will itself directly achieve internalisation with no need for further bargaining. We also show how ambiguous property rights can dominate a clear assignment of property rights for a case where recipients of damage can move to avoid damage, but must remain and actually receive damage in order to be recipients of compensation. Rights to either polluters to pollute, or to recipients of damage to compensation create a distortion; and either outcome is dominated by no assignment of property rights, but a tax on polluters (Pigouvian tax) with revenues redistributed equally to the whole population.

In this paper, we study the impact of tax policy on wage negotiations, workers' effort, and employment when effort is only imperfectly observable. We show that the different wage-setting motives – rent sharing and effort incentives – reinforce the effects of partial tax policy measures but not necessarily those of more fundamental tax reforms. We show that a higher degree of tax progression always leads to wage moderation, but the well-established result from the wage bargaining literature that a revenue-neutral increase in the degree of tax progression is good for employment does not carry over to the case with wage negotiations and imperfectly observable effort. While it remains true that introducing tax progression increases employment, we cannot rule out negative employment effects from an increase in tax progression when tax progression is already very high. ; In einem Modell mit Lohnverhandlungen und unvollständiger Beobachtbarkeit individueller Arbeitsanstrengungen zeigen wir, dass sich die verschiedenen Motive bei der Lohnfindung – Verteilung von Renten zwischen Arbeitgeber und Arbeitnehmern, Effizienzlohnerwägungen – sich in ihren Wirkungen gegenseitig verstärken. Für die Auswirkungen der Steuerpolitik auf die Beschäftigung bedeutet dies, dass eine progressivere Ausgestaltung des Steuersystems grundsätzlich zu mehr Lohnmoderation führt. Da eine höhere Steuerprogression jedoch zugleich die individuellen Anstrengungsanreize verringert, ist der Beschäftigungseffekt einer Steuerreform, die die Progression erhöht, a priori nicht eindeutig. Das aus der Lohnverhandlungsliteratur bekannte Ergebnis, dass Steuerprogression gut für die Beschäftigung sei, lässt sich somit in einem allgemeineren Modellrahmen nicht bestätigen. Zwar ist die Beschäftigung bei einem moderat progressiven Steuersystem generell höher als bei einem proportionalen Steuersystem, doch lassen sich negative Beschäftigungseffekte bei einer weiteren Erhöhung der Steuerprogression nicht ausschließen.

The purpose of this paper is to study toll and investment competition along a serial transport corridor competition allowing for partial cooperation between regional governments. Partial cooperation is modeled as a Nash bargaining problem with endogenous disagreement points. We show that the bargaining approach to partial cooperation implies lower tolls and higher quality and capacity investment than fully noncooperative behavior. Moreover, under bargaining, strategic behavior at the investment stage induces regions to offer lower quality and invest less in capacity as compared to full cooperation. Finally, Nash bargaining partially resolves the problem of welfare losses due to toll and capacity competition pointed out in the recent literature.

A key obstacle to reducing payroll taxes in many industrialized and transition countries is the direct revenue loss to the government that it implies. This paper studies a simple and practical labor tax reform of reducing a payroll tax and increasing a progressive wage tax that keeps the marginal tax wedge unchanged. Such a strategy increases employment, reduces the equilibrium unemployment rate, and increases public revenue as long as workers do not have all the bargaining power in wage negotiations. Moreover, welfare rises if workers' bargaining power is sufficiently large to exceed a critical value determined by the second-best Hosios condition.

Although many studies point to the significant influence of collective bargaining (CB) institutions on earnings inequalities, evidence on how these institutions shape poverty rates across developed economies remains surprisingly scarce. This paper explicitly addresses the relationship between CB systems and working-age poverty rates before and after taxes and transfers in 24 developed countries over the period 1990–2015. Our results show that countries with a more centralized CB system, a more extended bargaining coverage rate and/or a higher trade union density display significantly lower poverty rates. However, these results only hold in a post-tax benefit scenario. Controlling for country and time fixed effects and a wide range of covariates, our estimates indeed suggest that the poverty-reducing effect of CB institutions stems from the political strength of trade unions in promoting public social spending rather than from any direct effect on earnings inequalities. Sensitivity tests for endogeneity and overlapping samples support this conclusion. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Traditional political economy models of taxation fail to explain why there is so little redistribution of wealth despite significant wealth inequalites. This is for two reasons: (1) The median voter approach cannot deal with a multidimensional policy-space and (2) wealth taxation affects well-organized and homogenous interest groups so that lobbying affects policy outcomes. In this paper the interaction of factor price bargaining and delegated tax-lobbying is studied. Two agents engage in lobbying: managers of large firms and trade union leaders. Low wealth taxation is the natural consequence of income maxmimization on the side of interest group leaders if (1) managers are in a position to appropriate part of the firms' revenues for themselves and (2) union members cannot monitor the lobbying activities of union leaders.

Italy is not immune from the long term process towards greater bargaining decentralization under way in Western Europe. The article surveys the main actions, either defined by social partners or by government intervention, which have attempted to encourage this process in recent years, without altering the relative importance of different levels of bargaining. Empirical evidence shows that firm-level bargaining has been associated with innovative managerial practices, but also that a significant share of firms would be willing to sign contracts that would grant higher wages or preserve occupational levels in order to obtain higher flexibility in the use of the workforce. From an institutional standpoint, the main obstacles preventing the adoption of such deals are: i) unresolved issues related to the measurement of trade unions' weight at the national level and to the coexistence of two different workers' representation systems, ii) limits to contract enforcement, iii) limited scope for action of second level bargaining in determining both wages and work organization. The effectiveness of tax breaks encouraging a closer link between wage and productivity at the firm level has been undermined by poor monitoring and frequent changes to the eligibility criteria.

This paper analyzes the impact of legislative committee structure on policy outcomes, comparing a `tax committee' (enacting tax expenditures) and a decentralized system of specialized committees (undertaking direct spending). An endogenous commodity taxation framework is combined with models of legislative bargaining and committee voting. The main conclusion is that the tax committee structure gives rise to lower subsidy levels under a wide range of circumstances. However, it is only under a more restrictive set of assumptions that social welfare is higher in the tax committee regime. This theoretical analysis is illustrated by two examples of institutional change in Congress.

This paper analyzes the impact of legislative committee structure on policy outcomes, comparing a `tax committee' (enacting tax expenditures) and a decentralized system of specialized committees (undertaking direct spending). An endogenous commodity taxation framework is combined with models of legislative bargaining and committee voting. The main conclusion is that the tax committee structure gives rise to lower subsidy levels under a wide range of circumstances. However, it is only under a more restrictive set of assumptions that social welfare is higher in the tax committee regime. This theoretical analysis is illustrated by two examples of institutional change in Congress.

Although many studies point to the significant influence of collective bargaining institutions on earnings inequalities, evidence on how these institutions shape poverty rates across developed economies remains surprisingly scarce. It would be a mistake, though, to believe that the relationship between earnings inequalities and poverty is straightforward. Indeed, whereas earnings inequalities are measured at the individual level, poverty is calculated at the household level using equivalised (disposable) incomes. Accordingly, in most developed countries poverty is not primarily an issue of the working poor. This paper explicitly addresses the relationship between collective bargaining systems and working-age poverty rates in 24 developed countries over the period 1990-2015. Using an up-to-date and fine-grained taxonomy of bargaining systems and relying on state-of-the-art panel data estimation techniques, we find that countries with more centralised and/or coordinated bargaining systems display significantly lower working-age poverty rates than countries with largely or fully decentralized systems. However, this result only holds in a post-tax benefit scenario. Controlling for countryfixed effects and endogeneity, our estimates indeed suggest that the poverty-reducing effect of collective bargaining institutions stems from the political strength of trade unions in promoting public social spending rather than from any direct effect on earnings inequalities.

Although many studies point to the significant influence of collective bargaining institutions on earnings inequalities, evidence on how these institutions shape poverty rates across developed economies remains surprisingly scarce. It would be a mistake, though, to believe that the relationship between earnings inequalities and poverty is straightforward. Indeed, whereas earnings inequalities are measured at the individual level, poverty is calculated at the household level using equivalised (disposable) incomes. Accordingly, in most developed countries poverty is not primarily an issue of the working poor. This paper explicitly addresses the relationship between collective bargaining systems and working-age poverty rates in 24 developed countries over the period 1990-2015. Using an up-to-date and fine-grained taxonomy of bargaining systems and relying on state-of-the-art panel data estimation techniques, we find that countries with more centralised and/or coordinated bargaining systems display significantly lower working-age poverty rates than countries with largely or fully decentralized systems. However, this result only holds in a post-tax benefit scenario. Controlling for countryfixed effects and endogeneity, our estimates indeed suggest that the poverty-reducing effect of collective bargaining institutions stems from the political strength of trade unions in promoting public social spending rather than from any direct effect on earnings inequalities.

Although many studies point to the significant influence of collective bargaining institutions on earnings inequalities, evidence on how these institutions shape poverty rates across developed economies remains surprisingly scarce. It would be a mistake, though, to believe that the relationship between earnings inequalities and poverty is straightforward. Indeed, whereas earnings inequalities are measured at the individual level, poverty is calculated at the household level using equivalised (disposable) incomes. Accordingly, in most developed countries poverty is not primarily an issue of the working poor. This paper explicitly addresses the relationship between collective bargaining systems and working-age poverty rates in 24 developed countries over the period 1990-2015. Using an up-to-date and fine-grained taxonomy of bargaining systems and relying on state-of-the-art panel data estimation techniques, we find that countries with more centralised and/or coordinated bargaining systems display significantly lower working-age poverty rates than countries with largely or fully decentralised systems. However, this result only holds in a post-tax benefit scenario. Controlling for country-fixed effects and endogeneity, our estimates indeed suggest that the poverty-reducing effect of collective bargaining institutions stems from the political strength of trade unions in promoting public social spending rather than from any direct effect on earnings inequalities.