Tax competition and determination of the quality of public goods

In this paper, the authors analyze the behavior of local governments on capital taxation when the financial choices in terms of a public good quality are done by a central planner. More specifically, they ask the question whether a local government has an interest to tax the mobile factor in addition to the tax on representative households or not. The authors show, through a comparison of social welfare given the strategies chosen by the locals governments, that whatever the quality of the public good and its cost is, a local government always has an interest to tax the mobile factor. This leads to a Nash-equilibrium in dominant strategy in their model.