Equilibrium in fiscal competition games from the point of view of the dual.

Papers that examine fiscal competition for mobile factors of production commonly employ simultaneous move games between two states and focus on the inefficiency of the equilibria. Most often, the existence of the equilibrium is left unexplored. By examining decision making by governments that make...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Petchey, Jeffrey, Shapiro, P.
Format: Working Paper
Published: School of Economics and Finance, Curtin Business School 2008
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/38173
Description
Summary:Papers that examine fiscal competition for mobile factors of production commonly employ simultaneous move games between two states and focus on the inefficiency of the equilibria. Most often, the existence of the equilibrium is left unexplored. By examining decision making by governments that make only constrained efficient choices, we derive sufficient conditions for the existence of equilibria when there are multiple policy instruments, multiple mobile factors and many different production processes. Convexity of the minimum cost function, "dual" to the factor preferences and production function primitives, is sufficient to ensure the existence of equilibrium. We also find that equilibrium may not exist because of the economies of scale inherent in provision of public goods which benefit mobile factors.