Merging -or separating- real estate patrimony taxation and local taxation is still a debate in France. How much of these fiscal resources should be allocated to the State and how much should be channeled to local decision bodies? This research document expresses an overview of the 1994 to 2000...

We study the fiscal policy reactions of municipalities in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia to an unanticipated spending shock. The implementation of a horizontal transfer system led to additional contributions for selected municipalities. Using the quasi-random assignment, we examine...

This paper begins by comparing the 1967 Smith committee’s three volume report on Ontario taxation with the 1993 report by the Ontario Fair Tax Commission. These two very different investigations of Ontario’s tax structure, produced in two very different economic and political climates,...

We study the impact of local taxation on the location and growth of firms. Our empiricalmethodology pairs establishments across jurisdictional boundaries to estimate the impact of taxation. Our approach improves on existing work as it corrects for unobserved establishment heterogeneity, for...

Low corporate taxes can help attract new firms. This is the main mechanism underpinning the standard 'race-to-the-bottom'view of tax competition. A recent theoretical literature has qualified this view by formalizing the argument that agglomeration forces can reduce firms' sensitivity to tax...

The purpose of this paper is to identify the causal relationship between intergovernmental transfers and fiscal effort. Empirical evidence from Peruvian municipalities supports a negative relation. The substitution effect is decreasing on the level of municipalities’ expenditure and tends to...

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...

Im Hinblick auf eine mögliche Reform des kommunalen Finanzausgleichs in Niedersachsen weist dieser Beitrag auf den Zusammenhang zwischen diesem System und den Gewerbesteuerhebesätzen hin. Dafür werden die vom kommunalen Finanzausgleich ausgehenden Anreizeffekte auf die kommunale Hebesatzwahl...

This paper studies the impact of municipal non-residential property taxation on firms' performance using a panel data of italian manufacturing firms in 2001-2010. In the spirit of Duranton et al. (2011), we use a pairwise spatial difference instrumental variable estimator which allows to tackle...