Do citizens engage in comparative performance evaluation across local governments? And if they do, how can we disentangle this behavior from other forms of strategic interactions among local governments or simple spatial correlation across neighboring jurisdictions? We use spatial econometrics...

This paper investigates whether and how strongly the share of homeowners in a community affects residential property taxation by local governments. Different from renters, homeowners bear the full property tax burden irrespective of local market conditions, and the tax is more salient to them....

This paper investigates whether and how strongly the share of homeowners in a community affects residential property taxation by local governments. Different from renters, homeowners bear the full property tax burden irrespective of local market conditions, and the tax is more salient to them....

This paper provides empirical evidence for interdependence of jurisdictions' tax policies. We study tax policy interdependence between municipalities in the economically integrated European Metropolitan Area Frankfurt/Rhein-Main, that spreads across two German states, Hesse, and...

This paper exploits an exogenous reform of the local fiscal equalization scheme in the German State of North Rhine-Westphalia to identify tax mimicking by municipalities in the neighboring state of Lower Saxony. The spatial lag regressions provide no evidence for the existence of strategic...

This paper exploits detailed information on local political and socioeconomic networks and a reform of local fiscal equalization in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) to identify the role of learning in local tax rate interactions. Using this policy change in spatial lag IV regressions, we find that...

We develop a model of property taxation and characterize equilibria under three alternative taxation regimes often used in the public finance literature: decentralized taxation, centralized taxation, and "rent seeking" regimes. We show that decentralized taxation results in inefficiently high...

I analyze mobility responses to the unique introduction of regressive local income schedule in the Swiss Canton of Obwalden in 2006, which was aimed at attracting the top 1%. Differencein-Differences estimations comparing Obwalden to all other cantons confirm that the reform successfully...

We develop a model of property taxation and characterize equilibria under three alternative taxation regimes often used in the public finance literature: decentralized taxation, centralized taxation, and “rent seeking” regimes. We show that decentralized taxation results in inefficiently...