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The expanding literature on fiscal decentralization (FD) emphasizes the role of institutional mechanisms for FD's welfare effects. We analyze the welfare effects of FD in case of a fiscal transfer mechanism that punishes inefficiency in tax collection and compensates for local income deficiency. In addition, a portion of transfers is earmarked for investment. Given a level of FD and these rules, the representative local government chooses its tax collection effort to maximize local utility. The solution of the model reveals that the stricter the redistributive rule, the higher are steady-state fiscal efficiency and welfare. While the effectiveness of the redistributive parameters increases with centralization of the revenue pool, it decreases with the tax rate. Both welfare and income distribution, on the other hand, improve with the degree of revenue centralization and the tax rate. Besides, fiscal efficiency and redistribution decrease with investment-earmarked transfers.

This paper focuses on an old but still discussed postulate, the Khaldûn-Laffer curve, and empirically applies it to personal income tax by using annual time-series data of Turkey for the period 1970-2015. From our analysis, two fundamental findings emerge: first, Turkish data provides evidence in favor of the Khaldûn-Laffer curve, suggesting that there is a non-linearity between tax rates and tax revenue. Second, the optimal tax rate that maximizes revenue from personal income tax is 15.03% against the current rate we estimate at 15.37%. These findings imply that Turkey's current personal income tax rate falls slightly into the prohibitive range of the curve. Overall, it is safe to argue that the current personal income tax rate should be lowered to its optimal value to maximize the revenue from personal income taxation. If done so, the Turkish fiscal authorities would be able to generate more revenue with a relatively lower tax rate.

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This paper compares the case of fiscal decentralization (FD) with an intergovernmental transfer rule to the case of fiscal centralization (FC) from a theoretical perspective while focusing on Markovperfect Nash equilibrium by a continuum of citizens, local governments and a central government, which interact strategically. Simulation analysis shows that both the degree of spillovers and capital mobility play a role in the comparison of these two cases. In the presence of spillovers, the welfare of FD case is higher than the one of FC which is an unexpected result but points out the positive effect of a redistribution rule in FD model in terms of welfare. On the other hand, the growth rate of FD is lower than the FC case when there are spillovers. So, fiscal discipline, provided by the redistribution rule, prevents inefficiently low tax rates which pull down the growth rate. In addition, when spillovers are not allowed, capital mobility determines which case is superior.