It is often argued that tax competition may lead to a "race to the bottom". Such a race may hold indeed in the case of the pure case of factor mobility (such as capital mobility). However, in this paper we emphasize the unique feature of labor migration, that may nullify the "race to the bottom"...

The standard international tax model is extended to allow for heterogeneous firms when agglomeration forces are important thus allowing us to study the relocation effects of taxes that vary according to firm size. We show that allowing for heterogeneity permits a given tax scheme to have an...

Increasingly, local governments compete by offering substantial subsidies to industrial plants to locate within their jurisdictions. This paper uses a novel research design to examine the consequences of successfully bidding for a plant on county-level labor earnings, property values, and public...

We show that agglomeration forces can reverse standard international-tax-competition results. Closer integration may result first in a race to the top' and then a race to the bottom, a result that is consistent with recent empirical work showing that the tax gap between rich and poor nations...

Given the temptation on government officials to use some of their budget for 'perks,' residents face the problem of inducing officials to reduce such 'waste.' The threat to vote out of office officials who perform poorly is one possible response. In this paper, we explore the effect that...

This paper attempts to address two long standing questions in Public Finance: (i) why is the property tax, despite popular complaints about its fairness, the almost exclusive tax instrument used by local governments, and (ii) why do we consistently observe higher levels of governments undermine...

Contrary to a frequent contention, systems competition cannot work when governments respect the Subsidiarity Principle. The principle implies that governments step in where markets fail. Reintroducing markets through the back door of systems competition will again result in market failure. Three...