State borders create a discontinuous tax treatment of retail sales. In a Nash game, local tax rates will be higher on the low-state-tax side of a border. Local taxes will decrease from the nearest high-tax border and increase from the low-tax border. Using driving time from state borders and all...

Acting in the interest of their residents, within limits imposed by Federal statute and by the Constitution, states have incentives to impose taxes on the profits of corporations owned by nonresidents. This paper presents a model within which a state, using an apportionment formula that includes...

A simple theory suggests that a common form of federal horizontal equalization grants should cause subnational governments to levy higher tax rates, distorting local tax bases and so increasing federal transfers. To test this, I examine Canadian provincial tax policies in the 1972-2002 period....

We examine the effects of differences in income tax rates on commuting times within multi-state MSAs. Our theoretical model introduces a border into a model of an urban area and shows that differences in average tax rates distort commute times and interstate commutes. Empirically examining...

A recent Spanish tax reform granted regions the authority to set income tax rates, resulting in substantial tax differentials. We use individual-level information from Social Security records over a period of one decade. Conditional on moving, taxes have a significant effect on location choice....

There is often a gap between the prescriptions of an 'optimal' tax system and actual tax systems, some of which can be neither efficient economically nor efficient at redistributing income. With a focus on personal income taxes, this paper reviews the political economics literature on tax...

Standard tax competition models predict a ‘race-to-the-bottom' of corporate tax rates when firms are mobile. Recent theoretical literature has qualified this view by offering a theoretical explanation why this extreme prediction need not occur: central regions with large clusters of economic...

We empirically study the effects of broadband internet diffusion on local election outcomes and on local government policies using rich data from the U.K. Our analysis suggests that the internet has displaced other media with greater news content (i.e., radio and newspapers), thereby decreasing...

Most existing empirical evidence on the impact of profit taxation on multinational firm activity is based on cross-country data. One major drawback of such data is that countries differ not only with regard to taxes but along other dimensions which might be hard to capture by means of observable...

We study behavioral responses to local income taxes exploiting a special tax regime which applies to foreign employees residing in Switzerland. The used institutional setting generates two thresholds through which locally heterogeneous taxation is assigned: An income threshold at 120,000 Swiss...