Integration and Tax Competition: An Empirical Study of OECD Countries

This paper studies the effects of integration on capital taxation in a number of OECD countries. Unlike most previous papers on the subject, we combine key features from the new economic geography theory with the standard tax competition framework. We consider effective as well as statutory corporate tax rates and include several measures of agglomeration forces in the analysis. Our empirical findings provide some support for both models. We find that increased integration has a negative effect on corporate tax rates while agglomeration forces influence tax rates positively, though the latter result is sensitive to how agglomeration is measured.