Most cities enjoy some autonomy over how they tax their residents, and that autonomy is typically exercised by multiple municipal governments within a given city. In this chapter, we document patterns of city-level taxation across countries, and we review the literature on a number of salient...

When investigating the effects of federal grants on the behavior of lower-level governments, it is hard to defend the handling of grants as an exogenous factor affecting local governments; federal governments often set grants based on characteristics and performance of local governments. In this...

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...

In this paper we examine the degree to which Michigan's property value assessment growth cap has eroded the tax base and created substantial differences in effective tax rates among residential properties within the City of Detroit. While the analysis focuses on a specific city with significant...

Restrictions imposed on property assessment practices by state legislation such as Proposition 13 in California and Proposition 2½ in Massachusetts can lead to significant divergences between the assessed and market values of property, particularly for households with long tenures. As...

This paper proposes measures to quantify the effective level and the effective progressivity of taxation in a fiscally decentralized country taking income sorting into account. Using data on the universe of Swiss taxpayers, we find that rich households effectively face significantly lower...

I exploit an exogenous reform introducing a local business tax in Portugal to study tax mimicking among jurisdictions. The identification strategy relies on a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences methodology and heterogeneity in treatment intensity. Results show evidence of significant...

The 2008 financial crisis is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1929. It has been characterised by a housing bubble in a context of rapid credit expansion, high risk-taking and exacerbated financial leverage, leading to deleveraging and credit crunch when the bubble burst....

This paper considers the welfare implications of a tax on real estate transfers. A theoretical analysis shows how the discouragement of mutually beneficial transactions as well as tax-sheltering activities give rise to a welfare loss that can be estimated comprehensively from the empirical...

We consider an overlapping generations (OLG) economy with land as a fixed factor of production and an environmental externality on production in which tax revenue from land rent and/or from other schemes such as labor income, capital income, and production taxation can be used for environmental...