This paper shows how a popular system of federal revenue equalization grants can limit tax competition among subnational governments, correct fiscal externalities, and increase government spending. Remarkably, an equalization grant can implement efficient policy choices by regional governments,...

This paper examines how capital tax competition affects jurisdiction formation. We describe a locational model of public goods provision, where jurisdictions are represented by coalitions of consumers with similar tastes, and where the levels of taxation and local public goods provision within...

We examine both vertical and horizontal tax competition over time by studying the strategic response of county sales taxation to state sales taxes and to cross-border neighboring municipalities' combined (state and county) taxes. Using county and state sales tax data from 2003 through 2009, we...

Do governments in the emerging Asia and Pacific region independently set corporate tax rates? This paper answers the question and contributes to the growing empirical tax competition literature by (1) generating a predictable tax reaction function considering the ‘lumpy’ nature of economic...

Most cities enjoy some autonomy over how they tax their residents, and that autonomy is typically exercised by multiple municipal governments within a given city. In this chapter, we document patterns of city-level taxation across countries, and we review the literature on a number of salient...

Our paper extends the capital tax competition literature by incorporating heterogeneous capital and agglomeration. Our model nests the standard tax competition model as well as the special case in which there is agglomeration but no firm/capital heterogeneity and the opposite case, firm...

This paper models the migration of the Creative Class (Florida, 2003) in a New-Economic-Geography framework. Beside wage differentials, urban cultural amenities play an important role on the choice of location. A public cultural good, financed by taxes, is introduced as an agglomeration force....

This paper examines how municipal taxes respond to the local impact of a labor market shock. The analysis exploits a commuting policy that liberalized cross-border labor markets between Switzerland and the EU. The reform was implemented at a time of skilled labor shortages and led to a...