Attempts to measure the capitalization of local taxes into property prices, starting with Oates (1969), have suffered from a lack of local public service controls. We revisit this vast literature with a novel dataset of 947 time-varying local characteristic and public service controls for all...

German municipalities have substantial autonomy in setting taxes on two distinct tax bases: business profits and property values. We use this setting and a two-step approach to explore whether implemented tax policy is consistent with the seminal inverse-elasticity rule. First, we estimate the...

Do citizens engage in comparative performance evaluation across local governments? And if they do, how can we disentangle this behavior from other forms of strategic interactions among local governments or simple spatial correlation across neighboring jurisdictions? We use spatial econometrics...

Die vorliegende Studie liefert in drei gleichrangigen Teilen empirische Befunde zu den Steuern und Beiträgen auf lokaler Ebene. In den ersten beiden Teilen wird die Realsteuerpolitik deutscher Kommunen quantitativ datenempirisch und qualitativ in Form einer Expertenbefragung untersucht. Hierbei...