The very essence of both federal and unitary countries is multi-tiered governments. This architecture typically involves some commonality of tax bases between higher- and lower-level authorities. This process points to the existence of vertical externalities, i.e. of an inefficiently high degree...

This Paper tackles the issue of international fiscal coordination in a world where markets are integrated but national governments are sovereign. The consequences of capital market liberalization to national fiscal policies and possible remedies to resulting inefficiencies are analysed. A...

We consider fiscal competition between jurisdictions. Capital taxes are used to finance a public input and two public goods: one that benefits mobile skilled workers and one that benefits immobile unskilled workers. We derive the jurisdictions' reaction functions for different spending...

This paper uses a Finnish policy intervention to study tax competition among local governments. Changes in the statutory lower limits to the property tax rates are used as a source of exogenous variation to estimate the responses of municipalities to tax rates in their neighboring...

Many authors demonstrate that the tax gap resulting from tax competition increases with the size asymmetry of the competing countries. Consequently, increasing country-size disparities exacerbates the inefficiency of tax competition.The aim of this note is to show that this classical view has no...

This paper presents a theoretical model with a uniformly populated line that is divided into local jurisdictions (and/or states). If one level of government imposes sales and residential property taxes, and if the spatial extent of each taxing jurisdiction is positive and finite, then (in Nash...

This paper provides a simple theoretical model of capital tax competition between countries that differ in spatial location, and where cross-border investment costs are proportional to distance (a gravity model). We model EU membership as a reduction in ‘distance’ between countries. Precise...

Many authors demonstrate that the tax gap resulting from tax competition increases with the size asymmetry of the competing countries. Consequently, increasing country-size disparities exacerbates the inefficiency of tax competition. The aim of this note is to show that this classical view has...

In models of economic geography, plant-level scale economies and trade costs create incentives for spatial agglomeration of production into a manufacturing core and agricultural periphery, creating regional income differentials. We examine tax competition between national governments to...

This paper analyses tax competition between two countries of unequal size trying to attract a foreign-owned monopolist. When regional governments have only a lump-sum profit tax (subsidy) at their disposal, but face exogenous and identical transport costs for imports, then both countries will...