The mobility of the tax base may influence fiscal outcomes. The many theoretical contributions about the role of mobility are not matched by empirical evidence. Existing studies address strategic interaction between governments, but have little to say about mobility. We introduce a new measure...

This paper studies how changes in welfare benefit levels affect welfare recipients’ residential choices. Although several empirical studies have stressed that welfare policy may affect residential choices of welfare recipients, few studies have simultaneously taken into account that...

Recent theoretical contributions indicate favorable incentive effects of property taxation on public service providers. The object of this paper is to confront these theories with data from Norwegian school districts. The institutional setting in Norway is well suited for analyzing the effects...

This paper treats local governments as utility maximizing agents when they allocate resources among different service sectors. We present estimates for eight service sectors, based on a modified version of the extended linear expenditure system (ELES) and using observations at the municipal...

Fiscal disparities arise from differences in costs and capacity to produce a standard package of public services. This paper proposes to use a structural modelling approach as basis for measuring fiscal disparities across municipalities. This approach differs from the widely used reduced-form...

Many countries apply cost-equalization and/or fiscal capacity equalization formulas to enable sub-national governments to provide comparable service standards at comparable tax rates. This paper demonstrates how measures of expenditure needs and fiscal capacity can be derived from a structural...

Procedures of revenue estimation of changes in the personal income tax are discussed. Using revenue estimates of the 2006 tax cuts in the personal income tax in Norway as an example, we show that estimates of costs of cuts differ substantially when different effects are brought into...

The dual income tax provides the self-employed individual with large incentives to participate in tax minimizing income shifting. The present paper analyses the income shifting incentives under the Norwegian split model in the presence of technology risk, and it concludes that the widely held...

We develop and estimate a microeconometric model of household labour supply in five European countries representative of different economies and welfare policy regimes: Denmark, Italy, Norway, Portugal and United Kingdom. We then simulate, under the constraint of constant total net tax revenue,...

The inequality in pre-tax income increases in Norway in the 1990s, while the distribution of taxes is about unaltered. This means that tax progressivity has decreased in the period, as measured by summary indices of tax progressivity. This paper discusses to what extent this observed decrease in...