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...

France has a track record of persistent general government deficits, partly reflecting pro-cyclical fiscal policies in upswings. This has resulted in a quadrupling of its public debt-to-GDP ratio since the 1970s to above 80% of GDP. Reducing public debt is crucial because a high level of public...

Firms should use all available information to anticipate future tax rates. Firm mobility, as a key determinant of corporate tax rates, is one such source of information. We first show theoretically that a government sets a higher tax rates on firm profits if average firm mobility in its...

This paper investigates the effect of fiscal equalization on the efficiency properties of corporate income tax rates chosen by symmetric countries in a Nash tax competition game under the taxation principles of Separate Accounting and Formula Apportionment. Fiscal equalization ensures efficiency...

Though the U.S. federal investment tax credit (ITC) was permanently repealed in 1986, state-level ITCs have proliferated over the last few decades. Are these tax incentives effective in increasing investment within the state? How much of this increase is due to investment drawn away from other...

In this paper, we analyse the role of mobility in tax and subsidy competition. Our primary result is that increasing 'relocation' mobility of firms leads to increasing 'net' tax revenues under fairly weak conditions. While enhanced relocation mobility intensifies tax competition, it weakens...

We reassess the driving forces behind the recent decline of corporate tax rates in Europe. Using data for up to 32 countries from 1983 to 2006, we analyze the role of economic and financial openness as well as tax competition while allowing for dynamic adjustment to shocks and period-specific as...

Dramatic declines in capital tax rates among U.S. states and European countries have been linked by many commentators to tax competition, an inevitable “race to the bottom,” and underprovision of local public goods. This paper analyzes the reaction of capital tax policy in a given U.S. state...

This paper challenges the view that tax base equalization by the so-called Representative Tax System (RTS) removes inefficient undertaxation in corporate tax competition. The innovation of the paper is that it focuses on a tax on corporate income, instead of the unit tax on capital considered in...

The paper empirically analyzes the incentive effects of equalizing transfers on business tax policy by exploiting a natural experiment in the state of Lower Saxony which changed its equalization formula as of 1999. We resort to within-state and across-state difference-in-difference estimates to...