This paper is concerned with fiscal externalities arising from local taxation of a mobile factor. Using a panel of more 1100 local jurisdictions it provides empirical evidence on how the local tax rate as well as the tax rate in the neighborhood affect the local tax base. The results support the...

Studies of spatial policy interdependence in (local) public policies usually concentrate on the relations between jurisdictions within a single analysed region, and disregard possible extra-regional effects. This paper evaluates the validity of such restriction by studying German local...

The number of parties in government is usually considered to increase spending. We show that this is not necessarily the case. Using a new method to detect close election outcomes in multi-party systems, we isolate truly exogenous variation in the type of government. With data from...

This paper analyzes the occurrence of political budget cycles in 604 West German cities between 1975 and 2007. Due to the idiosyncratic timing of state and local elections, the budgetary changes before elections at two tiers of the federalist government can be separately estimated and can also...

We advance the literature on political budget cycles by testing separately for cycles in expenditures for elections in the legislative and the executive. Using municipal data, we can separately identify these cycles and account for general year effects. For the executive branch, we show that it...

We advance the literature on political budget cycles by testing separately for cycles in expenditures for elections in the legislative and the executive. Using municipal data, we can separately identify these cycles and account for general year effects. For the executive branch, we show that it...

This paper studies the importance of politician's qualification, in terms of education and experience, for fiscal outcomes. The analysis is based on a large panel for 2,031 German municipalities for which we have collected information on municipal budgets as well as the election results and...

We study the fiscal consequences of municipal mergers by making use of a largescale merger reform in the German federal state of Brandenburg. This reform, which was implemented from 2001 to 2003, led to a substantial reduction in the number of municipalities. Individual mergers were...

Despite the well-developed empirical literature on local tax competition, little is known about the actual spatial structure of inter-municipal competition. Assuming that competition takes place only among neighbours (as in the empirical literature) is at odds with the theoretical approaches...

Despite the well-developed empirical literature on local tax competition, little is known about the actual spatial structure of inter-municipal competition. Assuming that competition takes place only among neighbours (as in the empirical literature) is at odds with the theoretical approaches...