We study the business tax ("taxe professionnelle") behavior of the intermediate level (department) of local government in France and test in the same model the two hypotheses that department tax rates are explained by upper tier (region) tax rates and by tax rates chosen by other departments. We...

This paper tests the existence of strategic interactions among municipalities using a panel of Belgian local tax rates from 1985 to 2004. A special emphasis is put on the role of the language spoken in the various municipalities. Our results first confirm previous findings for Belgium suggesting...

This article investigates the effect of the intensity of political competition on the tax choices by local governments. More precisely, we study whether local governments determine their tax rates more in a Leviathan way, exploiting a low political competition to vote high tax rates, or in a...

L’intercommunalité représente le principal déterminant de la fiscalité locale pour toutes les taxes de 1993 à 2006. L’appartenance à un établissement public de coopération intercommunale (EPCI) tend à accroître les taux des quatre impôts directs locaux par rapport à une...

Cooperation among local governments has been encouraged to enable the aggregation of resources and improved public sector efficiency. However, if cooperation through the joint delivery of local public services is likely to be welfare enhancing for the agglomeration, but will lead to losses for...

The purpose of this paper is to assess the effects of inter-municipal fiscal cooperation on municipal public spending, based on the French experience. We estimate a model of municipal spending choice using panel data and spatial econometrics for municipalities over the period 1994-2003. We...

The aim of this paper is to test the presence of strategic interactions in government spending on Research and Development (R&D) among EU-15 countries. We add to the literature on public choice strategic interactions in general, and to work on R&D spending in particular. We take account of...

The main purpose of this paper is to assess the effects of fiscal cooperation on local taxation in a decentralized country, using the French experience in urban municipalities. We estimate a model of tax setting for local business tax using spatial and dynamic econometric techniques, for the...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the impact of local taxation on property prices in an urban French context, using data on property taxation and real estate transactions, over the period 1994-2004. Our empirical methodology pairs transactions in the same spatial environments to estimate...