State lotteries are an important source of state revenue in the 45 states that operate them. Following the repeal of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), 38 states and Washington, DC legalized sports betting. Mixed evidence exists on the relationship between spending on different forms of gambling, raising concerns about potential fiscal impacts. Using monthly lottery sales data from 18 states and a staggered difference-in-differences design exploiting legalization, we find no economically or statistically significant effect of sports betting on state lottery revenues. These results are robust across specifications and sub-samples.
The existence of the working poor is a well-recognised and worrisome phenomenon in contemporary Western societies. In this paper, it is argued that one of its causes is the prevalence of status-seeking behaviour among economic agents. Such behaviour can be seen as an evolutionary advantageous trait hard-wired in the agents’ brains; it has nevertheless negative consequences if disposable income is not spent to ensure the agent’s own basic health and survival. One of the possible policy remedies is the design of the tax system. We study an optimal tax system constrained by a no-poverty requirement that forces the social planner to set the tax rates in such a way that all agents achieve a minimum subsistence level of consumption. The policy recommendations are that, relative to non-working time, which is taken as a reference point, (i) marketed goods that are necessary to guarantee the basic needs of a person have to be treated leniently by the tax system; (ii) the status-signalling marketed goods should be treated analogously if they are complements to the basic items but taxed heavily if they are substitutes. It is also argued that the no-poverty requirement may conflict with the usual equity and efficiency requirements and may thus lead to different policy prescriptions.
This paper deals with the fiscal cost of climate induced urban flooding. A hedonic analysis of the sales price of around 900 residential properties, transacted from 2015 to 2019, reveals that flood risk lowers the mean sales price of residential homes by a margin of 12.6% to 15%. An analysis of officially defined zonal Annual Statement Rates (ASR), which is the common revenue base for two important taxes levied by state and local Government, was conducted for around 735 revenue zones of Greater Mumbai for the period 2003 to 2023. It suggests robust and distribution-sensitive effects of flood risk on property values. Findings of the paper underscore the need for land-based revenue options and the formulation of appropriate adaptation strategies.
In recent years the EU has been concerned about third countries reciprocating access, in their own domestic Public Procurement Markets (PPM), to EU firms as much as Europe does to third countries’ companies. Reaching a consensus on how to behave with third countries firms was a difficult and time taking process in EU. This paper aims to contribute to understand the difficulties of reciprocation in opening PPM. Within a stylised game theoretic framework, the main message of the paper suggests that open PPM may be more likely under two main conditions. When in the countries’ negotiations the perspective of contracting authorities prevails or, when the business firms’ perspective prevails, however as long as negotiators can reliably estimate and explicitly take into account the companies’ costs for executing contracts. Because of the model assumptions and limitations, the above findings can only be interpreted as examples rather than general conclusions.
Chief ministers in India play among the most important roles in determining access to a wide range of public services. Do chief ministers use the power of their office to enhance public service delivery broadly across the states in which they govern? Or do they more narrowly direct resources towards the individual constituencies they represent and in which they must seek re-election? Using a geographical proximity design, we examine new data covering 1992 to 2012 to study the impact of chief minister representation on a constituency’s access to electricity and find clear variations in distribution strategies across states. We find that chief ministers target their constituencies with increases in electricity supply. These variations in public service targeting are driven by differences in institutional environment and political security of India’s chief ministers. We also find some evidence of short-term positive spillovers in the local region.
