Matching Grants and Ricardian Equivalence
U of London Queen Mary Economics Working Paper No. 440
17 Pages Posted: 19 Oct 2001
Date Written: October 2001
Abstract
This paper questions the effectiveness of matching grants to correct for interjurisdictional spillovers in the light of Bernheim general neutrality result. Indeed this result suggests that the usual argument that matching grants are needed to internalize the externality arising from the existence of interjuridictional spillovers is an artifact of the assumption that jurisdictions neglect the impact that their decisions have on the federal budget. Relaxing this assumption and using a classical model where the arbitrage resulting from labor mobility implies that redistribution has the properties of a public good, we find that matching grants are relevant although much less effective. We also find that optimal matching rates are independent of the jurisdictions' choice of policy variable contrarily to the case where jurisdictions ignore the impact of their decisions on the federal budget.
Keywords: Fiscal federalism, Ricardian equivalence, matching grants
JEL Classification: H23, H70
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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