This paper quantifies the unequal welfare effects of tax competition. I derive the optimal tax and transfer schedules in a free mobility union composed of countries that can either compete or set a uniform federal tax rate. In the absence of fiscal coordination, governments internalize that any...

The share of pre-tax income flowing to the top of the UK income distribution increased continually and substantially in the three decades leading up to the financial crisis, but has changed little since 2013. Using microdata sampled from UK tax records, we describe the nature of top incomes in...

Empirical research in public economics, including our own, often uses variation in state and local taxes as an empirical laboratory to estimate causal relationships. A key concern is that other taxes might change at the same time. To assess this concern, we develop a dataset of state (1977-2022)...

We collect detailed data on U.S. state personal income, corporate, sales, cigarette, gasoline, and alcohol taxes over the past 70 years to shed light on the determinants of state tax policies. We provide a comprehensive summary of how tax policy has changed over time, within and across states....

How has globalization affected the relative taxation of labor and capital, and why? To address this question we build and analyze a new database of effective macroeconomic tax rates covering 150 countries since 1965, constructed by combining national accounts data with government revenue...

This paper analyzes how minimum local property tax rates affect local tax policy choice. In Finland, central government has raised the limits on property tax rates several times in the past 30 years. I construct a measure of forced tax rate increases caused by these reforms and examine how...

German municipalities levy local business taxes by choosing a tax rate to apply to local business income, where the tax base is defined uniformly at the national level. Before the federal government's imposition of a minimum tax rate in 2004, some municipalities such as the tiny North Sea town...

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...

This paper examines the impact of state and local tax differentials on the location of industry using a panel data set of manufacturing firm startups. The number of firm births is modeled as a Poisson count process and the estimation technique explicitly accounts for unobserved location or state...

This essay describes and evaluates state and local business tax incentives in the United States. In 2014, states spent between $5 and $216 per capita on incentives for firms in the form of firm-specific subsidies and general tax credits, which mostly target investment, job creation, and research...