Bei der Reform der Gemeindefinanzen wird einerseits ein „revitalisiertes“ Gewerbesteuermodell und andererseits ein Zuschlagsmodell auf Einkommen- und Körperschaftsteuer diskutiert. Welches sind die Vor- und Nachteile der beiden Konzepte? Widersprechen die Modelle einander?

Das heutige kommunale Steuersystem weist insgesamt keine ausreichende Ergiebigkeit auf und hat sich aufgrund wiederholter Eingriffe des Gesetzgebers seit vielen Jahren nicht mehr wachstumsproportional entwickelt. Wie sollte das Gemeindesteuersystem reformiert werden?

Taxes levied by Brazil's 5.563 municipalities are significant components of the country's aggregate gross tax burden. However, official high-frequency aggregate data on these revenues are unavailable as of this moment. This paper develops a methodology for estimating them. Two procedures are...

Distribution of tax revenue among municipalities - which are constitutionally official federal entities in Brazil - is highly unequal vis-à-vis their demands of public services. Given conurbation processes and intense urbanization in the second half of the past century, some municipalities...

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether politicians manipulate the timing of tax rate changes in a strategic way to maximize reelection prospects. To do so, we exploit the German local business tax as a testing ground which is set autonomously by German municipalities. As election dates...

Despite important policy implications associated with the allocation of education resources, evidence on the effectiveness of school inputs remains inconclusive. In part, this is due to endogenous allocation; families sort themselves non-randomly into school districts and school districts...

Die Kommunen leiden nicht erst seit der Wirtschafts- und Finanzkrise unter zunehmenden Finanzierungsproblemen. Sie versuchen, diese durch die Erhebung von Bagatellsteuern zu lösen. Erfolgversprechender wäre eine Steuer, die beitragsähnlichen Charakter hat und an Konsumausgaben mit hoher...

While the literature on how intergovernmental grants affect the budget of receiving jurisdictions is numerous, the very few studies that explicitly deal with likely endogeneity problems focus on grants targeted towards specific sectors or to specific type of recipients. The results from these...

This paper uses data on Swedish local governments to test for strategic interaction in tax setting. We make no a priori assumptions regarding the underlying behaviour of individuals, but instead attempt to test for the presence and type of underlying spatial process. First, we employ the...

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...