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 neighbouring...

Many countries tax voluntary pension savings using the so-called EET model, based on tax-deductible savings and taxable withdrawals. In Finland the tax reform of 2005 changed the tax rate schedule from progressive to proportional, while the basic structure of the EET model was retained. This...

The design of a tax system is a daunting task. Economies have become increasingly complex, which makes the design of taxes has to take into account behavioral taxpayers' responses - including mobility -, but also tax planning issues. Additionally, increasing inequality trends put more pressure...

We use data for all Italian municipalities, from 2001-2006, to empirically test the extent to which two electoral rules, which hold, for small and large municipalities, affect fiscal policy decisions. Municipalities with fewer than 15,000 inhabitants elect their mayors in accordance with a...

This paper proposes an approach to measure efficiency of a set of units operating in an administrative public service, namely real estate cadastral offices, which have not been analysed previously. This study has been made possible thanks to the database provided by the Directorate General of...

Several theoretical papers that examine tax competition with agglomeration effects have stressed the possibility that the governments of jurisdictions in which economic activity is concentrated may tax firms more heavily (taxable agglomeration rents). In this paper, we examine the tax rate...

Besley and Rosen (1998) were the first authors to empirically estimate the presence of vertical tax externalities. They tested it on gasoline and tobacco unitary taxes. However, they did not take into account the difference in cost of living across states: high cost areas pay less in real terms...