"Overlapping Tax Revenue, Soft Budget, and Rent Seeking"

This paper investigates how the soft-budget constraint with grants from the central government to local governments tends to internalize the vertical externality of local public investment by stimulating local expenditure when both the central and local governments impose taxes on the same economic activities financed by public investment. The model incorporates the local governments' rent-seeking activities in a multi-government setting. The soft-budget constraint is welfare deteriorating because it stimulates rent-seeking activities, although a soft-budget game may attain the first-best level of public investment.

"Defense Expenditures and Allied Cooperation"

This paper investigates the implications of cooperative and non-cooperative defense spending of allied countries in conflicting blocs using static and leader-follower game models. It is well known that in the three-country world with two allies and an adversary all countries may be worse off when the allies cooperate than when they do not. We show that when the number of countries in each separate bloc is large, the countries in one bloc may be better off by cooperating than not even if the negative spillover from the adversarial bloc is large. Furthermore, cooperative behavior in a leader-follower game by the leader bloc can attain a better outcome than non-cooperation.

"Overlapping Tax Revenue, Local Debt Control and Soft-Budget Constraint"

This paper investigates how the soft budget constraint with grants from the central government to local governments tends to internalize the vertical externality by stimulating insufficient local expenditure when both the central and local governments impose taxes on the same economic activities from public investment. The theoretical model incorporates local governments' rent-seeking activities in a multi- government setting with and without central controls on local borrowing. Two channels through debt issuance and public investment cause the soft budget outcome. In the unrestricted scheme of local debt issuance we have the positive effect on public investment and debt issuance although it would also stimulate wasteful rent seeking activities. In the restricted scheme of local debt issuance the soft budget case may not stimulate public investment since its effect through debt issuance is absent. In either case the soft budget constraint is welfare improving if the marginal valuation of central public goods is relatively small and/or the tax share of local government is relatively small.

"Laffer paradox, Leviathan, and Political Contest"

This paper considers a political contest model wherein self-interested politicians seek rents from the public budget, while general voters make political efforts to protest against politicians' rent seeking directly (for example, through voting in referendums such as the passage of Proposition 13) or indirectly (for example, through donating money to organized groups such as the National Taxpayer Union). We show that the political contest may ironically lead to the Laffer paradox; that is, rent-seeking politicians may intend to set the tax rate higher than the revenue-maximizing rate. For taming Leviathans, political protests may not be as effective as competition among governments.

"Efficiency of Disaggregate Public Capital Provision in Japan"

We investigate the efficiency of disaggregated public capital provision for the Japanese economy. We estimate the optimality conditions based on simultaneous Euler equations by using GMM. Our results suggest that public capital productivities have been relatively high and divergent among several public capital goods. The allocation of public works is not optimal yet in Japan.

"Tax Competition, Public Good Provision, and Income Redistribution: The Case of Linear Capital Income Tax"

This paper considers a tax competition model in which regional government activities include income redistribution as well as public good provision. To incorporate the regional government function of income redistribution, we extend the tax system from the stylized proportional capital income tax to the linear capital income tax: the revenue collected from capital taxation in each region is used not only to provide the regional public good but also to offer a uniform lump-sum grant to each individual in the region. In contrast to Hoyt's (1991) finding that the extent to which public goods are undersupplied is monotonically increasing in the number of competing regions, we show that, regardless of the number of competing regions, all heterogeneous individuals concur with each other on the first-best provision of public goods; on the other hand, the size of income redistribution is monotonically decreasing in the number of competing regions.

"Soft-Budget Constraints and Local Expenditures"

This paper investigates how the soft budget constraint with grants from the central government to local governments tends to exaggerate inefficient local expenditures. We first develop a theoretical model, which explains soft budget problem in a multi-government setting. We then show that in Japan's case local governments implemented inefficient public investments and hence the bad outcome of soft budget problem occurred in the 1990s.

Japan's Fiscal Policy and Fiscal Reconstruction

This paper investigates the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy and the fiscal reconstruction movement in Japan. We first summarize Japan's fiscal policy in recent years and discuss advantages and disadvantages of government deficits. Next, we investigate the macroeconomic effects of Japanese fiscal policy and evaluate the plausibility of non-Keynesian effects. We also analyze the possibility of the crowding-in effect of fiscal policy and investigate the spillover effects of deregulation. Finally, we discuss political constraints in the fiscal reconstruction attempts and propose some measures for successful fiscal reforms in the near future.

"Collective Risk Control And Group Security: The Unexpected Consequences of Differential Risk Aversion"

We provide an analysis of odds-improving self-protection for when it yields collective benefits to groups, such as alliances of nations, for whom risks of loss are public bads and prevention of loss is a public good. Our analysis of common risk reduction shows how diminishing returns in risk improvement can be folded into income effects. These income effects then imply that whether protection is inferior or normal depends on the risk aversion characteristics of underlying utility functions, and on the interaction between these, the level of risk, and marginal effectiveness of risk abatement. We demonstrate how public good inferiority is highly likely when the good is "group risk reduction." In fact, we discover a natural or endogenous limit on the size of a group and of the amount of risk controlling outlay it will provide under Nash behavior. We call this limit an "Inferior Goods Barrier" to voluntary risk reduction. For the paradigm case of declining risk aversion, increases in group size/wealth will cause provision of more safety to change from a normal to an inferior good thereby creating such a barrier.

"National Adversity: Managing Insurance and Protection"

This paper concerns self-insurance and self-protection that countries may implement at a national level in pursuit of their security. The distinctions self-insurance, self-protection, and market insurance were first made by Ehrlich and Becker (1972). Nevertheless, extension of their models to international security where market insurance for entire countries is usually unavailable is surprisingly sparse. We show that, in the absence of market insurance, self-insurance alone raises important new issues as to the definition of "fair pricing" and as to the relations between pricing, optimization, risk aversion, and inferiority that are significantly different from standard, conventional market analysis. We also discover a hitherto unrecognized tendency for misallocation between selfprotection and self- insurance when both are available and considered together. Because of external effects running from self- protection to self-insurance, governments trying to find the right balance face incentives that encourage extreme, self-inflicted moral hazard, to the detriment of self-protection. Moreover, rather innocuous assumptions concerning countries' preferences lead to pervasive goods inferiority for both insurance and protection. Consequently, unlike the conventional wisdom in the economic theory of alliances with its neat interior Nash-solutions, we show when "defense" or "security" is disaggregated into more realistic categories such as protection and insurance that instabilities and corner solutions will be the conventional standard. The resulting perverse incentives that we discover point to conflicts and other difficulties among agents trying to cooperate in their management insurance and protection must overcome. Moreover the analysis implies that the paradigm Olson-Zeckhauser model (1966) model for alliance allocative behavior was fundamentally insufficient for the problem it was designed to address.