Scotland is engaged in a lively and on-going debate on greater fiscal autonomy and independence, which is politically controversial, especially in respect of tax-varying powers. The Scottish Parliament has the power to make a balanced-budget adjustment in public expenditure by varying the basic...

In federal countries, such as the U.S., the fiscal authority consists not of one, but many governments, with state governments accounting for a sizable share of expenditures. We analyze how state partisanship of politicians affects state fiscal policy and quantify the possible macroeconomic...

The literature on horizontal tax interdependencies offered limited attention to the interactions on administrative policies although they play an important role in determining the total tax revenues collected. The incentive for sub-central tax authorities to share relevant taxpayer-specific...

The identification of strategic interactions among local governments is typically plagued by endogeneity problems. This paper proposes a quasi-experimental strategy to identify independent personal income tax setting by Swiss municipalities making use of the multi-tier federal system. State...

The paper analyses the European Union sub-national governments' tax revenue structures and their dynamic during the last decades. Tax composition obtained a considerable interest during the recent years, particularly after the recent global financial and economic crisis. In many European Union...

Many governments have replaced traditional cash-based accounting with some form of accrual-based accounting system. However, empirical evidence on the effects of the public accounting system on fiscal policy is scarce. Following rules by the federal states, municipalities in Germany have adopted...

The tax auditing parameters have scarcely been analyzed by the literature as relevant policy-making instruments; however the enforcement strategies are crucial elements of the tax burden. In this paper we show that in a federal framework the tax auditing policies could represent additional tools...

We here expand the static tax competition models in symmetric small regions, which were indicated by Zodrow and Mieszkowski (1986) and Wilson (1986), to a dynamic tax competition model in large regions, taking consideration of the regional asymmetry of productivity of public capital and the...

In this paper, commuting is introduced to a federal economy where benevolent lower-level (state) governments levy an ad valorem tax on labour income. This results in inefficiently low levels of taxation, even when households as a whole do not migrate. Indeed, rather than attracting more workers...

Spending on productive infrastructure is seen as an important contributor to long term economic growth. Several authors have documented a downward trend in public investment during the last three decades and warned about its possible detrimental effects on the economy. A not well-realized fact...