International Tax and Public Finance

The paper addresses the incentives of the public sector to implement new technologies in public service provision. The focus is on the role of local governments under decentralization. Exploiting variation in the level of innovation in a large sample of US school districts, the impact of yardstick competition on the choice of public sector technologies is identified. It is shown that the impact of other districts’ innovation activity on a district’s innovation score is much stronger in communities where incumbents face a high risk of being elected out of office. This finding suggests that under decentralization, yardstick competition is an important force shaping the decisions of local governments to adopt new technologies.

Top decision-makers (such as the U.S. President) often serve short terms, but make decisions with consequences long after they are gone. (Appointments of judges or of Federal Reserve Board members are two examples.) When a leader can choose his effort on an appointment, the organization’s performance may increase when the minimum term for an appointment increases, and when decisions are irreversible. In addition, ideological preferences can lead to better appointments.

While it has long been recognized that under imperfect competition ad valorem and specific taxation differ in their effects, the optimal combination of the two instruments has received little attention. This paper shows how combining the two taxes can eliminate the welfare loss due to imperfect competition by inducing profit-maximizing firms to charge the appropriate Ramsey price.

This note shows that residence- and source-based taxes on capital income are not sufficient to sustain an efficient Nash equilibrium when several goods are internationally traded, apart from two special cases. With several traded commodities, domestic fiscal policies affect foreign welfare not only through changes in the world interest rate but also through changes in the equilibrium relative prices of traded commodities. In order to guarantee the existence of an efficient Nash equilibrium in the general case, additional tax instruments are required. In particular, destination-based taxes on traded commodities are needed to enable the government to control the relative commodity prices faced by domestic consumers. In addition, in order to shield domestic producers from changes in world prices, the government must levy either origin-based commodity taxes or taxes on the immobile factors.

Although the hope may be to reduce economic distortions in captial markets, the primary focus of corporate tax consolidation among member states of a federation is to reduce compliance and administrative burdens. For example, the Canadian provinces have sufficient flexibility to determine their corporate tax policies, and effective tax rates on captial vary considerably by province, but they still have achieved a considerable degree of harmonization of tax bases. The European Union should also try to implement a consolidated tax base for companies. A compulsory base would be best, but it is likely that the optional consolidated tax base is most practical at this time.

Standard tax multipliers are a widespread feature of fiscal equalization systems. A simple theoretical model shows that actual tax multipliers respond positively to changes in standard tax multipliers. This theoretical prediction is tested empirically using data on municipalities in Germany. A quasi-experiment in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia is exploited to identify the incentive effect. The empirical results confirm that local business tax policy is shaped by standard tax multipliers. They provide a straightforward practical tool to avoid a race to the bottom in local business tax rates.

The level of revenues pocketed by a government during the fiscal year often deviates from that projected by this government in its budget. Despite a flourishing literature on, for example, the technical or procedural determinants of such forecast errors, little is yet known about how political stratagems may affect forecast errors. In the present paper, we analyse whether differences in the level of government fragmentation are useful in explaining local government tax revenue forecast errors—controlling for various other factors. Using data on 242 Flemish municipalities for the period 1992–2002, we find that two-party governments are more optimistic than single-party governments. In contrast to our initial expectations, governments with at least three parties are significantly more careful (or less optimistic) in their revenue projections than single- or two-party governments.

How do dividend taxes affect stock volatility? If a risk-averse executive faces price risk through his incentive contract, changes in stock volatility due to dividend taxes may increase agency costs and therefore decrease overall welfare. In this paper, I use a decrease in dividend taxes as a natural experiment to identify their effect on the firm’s idiosyncratic stock return volatility. Stock volatility decreased after the tax cut for firms at which executives have larger sensitivity to stock price in their incentive compensation package relative to firms at which executives have a smaller sensitivity. Therefore, with risk-averse executives and risk-neutral shareholders, dividend taxes may exacerbate agency costs. The increase in agency costs will decrease shareholder welfare, which can be partially offset by the use of options in the employment contract.

We study the responsiveness of small- and medium-sized firms to a small-business corporate income tax schedule using population-wide administrative data from South Africa. We find sizeable bunching of firms at the corporate income thresholds where the corporate tax rate increases, implying active responses to corporate income taxes. The observed bunching is very sharp and reacts immediately to changes in the location of the kink points. These observations suggest that a sizeable part of the response is driven by reporting responses rather than real economic behavior. We find indicative evidence that reporting behavior is linked to underreporting of sales and legal tax-planning activities.