The UK Road Fund was set up in 1921 and financed by earmarked taxes, but was unsuccessful as a form of road finance and abandoned in 1937. The paper examines why earmarking failed and what problems arise for replacing road taxes by hypothecated road charges. These charges would need to be regulated and could evolve into a more efficient system of road pricing. The paper claims that recent exper...

We ask whether tax earmarking can foster accountability in public provision of goods and services when consumers can privately monitor provision. We show that earmarking can raise the stakes that consumers have in monitoring public provision independently of how taxes are earmarked, because it introduces a more direct linkage between monitoring and taxes paid.

Empirical evidence evaluating the e¢ciency of economic instruments is still rare, despite signi...cant theoretical advances over the last decades. The purpose of the paper is to evaluate one form of environmental taxation, the French tax on air pollution from 1990-99. While starting out in 1985 as a tax levied only on sulphur emissions, the tax base was subsequently extended to encompass also e...

Under what is known as the situs rule, a 1 percent locally levied sales tax is collected by the state but returned to the jurisdiction where the sale occurred. Thus, the situs rule gives cities an incentive to promote the location of retail businesses within their boundaries—an incentive that does not exist for residential or industrial development. Although sales taxes are a modest share of to...

Public school finance mechanisms differ from state to state, and they are often extremely complex. Most commonly, the federal government contributes about 7% of the total school budget, and the remainder is split fairly evenly between local contributions (primarily raised through local property taxes) and state contributions (primarily raised through state income taxes and sales taxes). The ave...