The effects of agglomeration on tax competition: evidence from a two-regime spatial panel model on French data

This article studies how agglomeration economies affect tax competition between local jurisdictions. We develop a theoretical model with two main testable predictions: in a setting where agglomeration forces lessen the responsiveness of capital to tax, high-regime agglomeration jurisdictions should adopt a rent-taxing behavior, and they should react less to their neighbors’ tax policies. The panel dataset spans the period from 1995 to 2007 and focuses on the local business taxes set at the French mid-subnational jurisdiction level of départements. First, instrumental variables estimates indicate that attractive jurisdictions capture a significant part of firms’ agglomeration rent by levying higher tax rates. An increase by 1% of the localization economies indicator (a specialization index) leads to increasing the business tax rate by 0.43%. Second, local tax setting behaviors are characterized by a mimetic behavior, with best response functions that slope upwards. We propose a two-agglomeration-regime spatial lag model to estimate through ML the relationship between tax competition and attractiveness. Our main result shows that both are linked and tax mimicry is less pronounced if a jurisdiction is agglomerated. Specifically, in response to a decrease in the tax rate of neighboring local governments by 1%, local governments with strong agglomeration economies reduce their tax rate by 0.4% against 0.6% for local government characterized by a low-agglomeration regime. We show that the classical one-size-fits-all-case of a single regime of agglomeration suffers from a 40% downward bias for low-agglomeration jurisdictions. We draw the link to policy praxis by discussing the optimal design of equalization schemes.     

地方官员更替、企业辖区知名度与股价同步性

以2009～2013年我国A股上市公司为研究样本,实证分析地方官员更替、辖区企业知名度与股价同步性的关系,结果表明:地市级政府官员变更所带来的政治不确定性会显著降低辖区企业的股价同步性,并且相对于新任官员来源于本地而言,新任官员来源于异地更能够显著地降低辖区内企业的股价同步性.进一步研究还发现,当地市级政府官员发生变更时,相对于辖区知名度较高的企业而言,辖区知名度较低的企业会披露更多的企业私有信息以应对政治不确定性风险,从而其股价同步性有了更大程度的降低.研究的结论证实了政治不确定风险的增加能够显著降低辖区内企业的股价同步性,客观上有助于提高股价的信息含量.     

Administrative Federalism and a Central Government with Regionally Based Preferences

Administrative federalism is defined as a constitution where the central state sets quality standards for public projects, and the local jurisdictions decide which projects are to be carried out. Decentralized decisions are inefficient because of an interjurisdictional spillover. A centralized decision is inefficient because the center favors one region and is restricted to distortionary instruments when redistributing between regions. For intermediate values of the spillover, it is shown that administrative federalism leads to a higher welfare than both centralization and decentralization. Moreover, because jurisdictions fear to be exploited, they only join a federation whose constitution is administrative federalism but not one with a fully centralized constitution.     

On NIMBY and commuting

The paper highlights that the race-to-top result shown by Wellisch (J. Urban Econ. 37:290–310, 1995) and Kunce and Shogren (J. Environ. Econ. Manage. 50:212–224, 2005a) may be exacerbated by inter-jurisdictional commuting, leading to increased NIMBY behavior (Not-In-My-Back-Yard) among metropolitan jurisdictions. Local governments try to push polluting economic activities to the neighboring jurisdictions, while commuting guarantees their residents’ labor income. Commuting generates a leakage of the local production benefits of pollution as non-resident commuters take the wages to their home jurisdictions. Jurisdictions may thus face a prisoners’ dilemma, in which they all push for pollution levels that are too low (race-to-the-top). Fiercer competition in the common labor market due to a larger number of jurisdictions intensifies this race-to-the-top in environmental regulation; whereas transboundary pollution, local ownership of firms, pollution taxes, and payroll taxes reduce the incentive for overly restrictive pollution policies.     

Corruption,governance, and public pension funds

We examine the effects of state corruption as well as political and governance factors on U.S. public pension funds. We find that pension funds in states with more corruption have lower performance; a one standard deviation increase in corruption is associated with a decrease in annual returns of at least 14 basis points, and this relationship is robust to state-level and pension-level fixed effects. Pensions located in more corrupt jurisdictions also invest a larger fraction of their assets in equities. We find that having a new treasurer decreases the negative effects of corruption, suggesting that more frequent changes in administrations are beneficial in corrupt jurisdictions. Governance-related variables and political affiliation variables are by themselves not significantly related to pension returns, although these variables are associated with differences in asset allocation.     

The Effects of Government Regulations on the Supply of Pawn Loans: Evidence from 51 Jurisdictions in the U.S.

We contribute to the modest amount of existing empirical research on the fringe banking industry by examining the effects of two jurisdiction-specific restrictive regulations on the supply of pawn loans. Controlling for poverty levels, education levels, and population density, state-by-state data presented in this paper from the 51 political jurisdictions in the United States suggests considerable effects in expected ways on five aspects of supply from the two regulations. More specifically, the study provides support for the suggestion that interest rate ceilings and a requirement to return excess proceeds from the sale of collateral items tend to reduce the number of store hours, loan/value ratios, the number of very small loans made, and the number of existing pawnshops. An erratum to this article is available at .     

Natural Disaster Insurance and the Equity-Efficiency Trade-Off

This article investigates the role of private insurance in the prevention and mitigation of natural disasters. We characterize the equity‐efficiency trade‐off faced by the policymakers under imperfect information about individual prevention costs. It is shown that a competitive insurance market with actuarial rate making and compensatory tax‐subsidy transfers is likely to dominate regulated uniform insurance pricing rules or state‐funded assistance schemes. The model illustrates how targeted tax cuts on insurance contracts can improve the incentives to prevention while compensating individuals with high prevention costs. The article highlights the complementarity between individual incentives through tax cuts and collective incentives through grants to the local jurisdictions where risk management plans are enforced.     

Yardstick competition and the political costs of raising taxes: An empirical analysis of Spanish municipalities

We test the ‘yardstick competition’ hypothesis by examining the effects of property tax increases, both in a given municipality and in other neighbouring jurisdictions, on the incumbents’ vote. In order to obtain unbiased estimates of the effects of raising taxes on voting patterns, we take into account national political shocks, the ideological preferences of the citizenship and government traits, and apply Instrumental Variables. The vote equation is estimated using a large database containing nearly 3,000 Spanish municipalities, and we analyse three local election results (1995, 1999 and 2003). Our results suggest that property tax increases, both at the municipal and neighbourhood level, have a non-negligible impact on the incumbent’s share of the vote. JEL Classification H71 · H73     

政治关联、融资渠道与民营企业非效率投资研究

从自由现金流和银行贷款两方面考量2007~2010年沪深A股民营上市企业政治关联对企业非效率投资的影响。结果表明,存在政治关联民营企业容易利用自由现金流和银行长期贷款进行过度投资;存在地方政治关联的民营企业,其自由现金流的过度投资更严重,中央政治关联企业则存在更多利用长期贷款进行过度投资的行为。同时,投资不足的民营企业政治关联降低了企业投资对于自由现金流和银行短期贷款的依赖;中央政治关联的民营企业投资对于银行长期贷款的敏感度更高,地方政治关联企业未发现类似的显著影响。     

论公共品的权限问题

地方公共品的供给是个复杂的问题,不仅涉及到地区间利益的分配,也涉及到个体间福利的变化.从空间意义上看,每一公共品既有一定的受益边界,又对应着一定的供给主体.本文通过分析这两者之间的关系,探讨了地方公共品供给达到最优的条件,并对此基础上产生的几种制度安排作了评析.     

大学生思想政治教育方法的探索

随着我国高等教育事业的快速发展,大学生数量与日俱增,高等院校大学生思想状况也呈现出许多新特点。在新的历史阶段,大学生思想政治教育是一项全方位立体式的工作,在教育内容上不仅是思想政治理论方面的教育,更多的是学生日常生活中为人处世方面的教育;在形式上不仅是课堂教学,更多的是日常生活的人文关怀;在力量上,不仅包括政工人员和教师,更多的是让学生自己感悟、自我体验、自我教育、自我提高。本文从提高大学生思想政治教育战略意义的认识上提出加强和改进大学生思想政治教育的思路。     

A Second-Best Theory of Local Government Policy

This paper provides a model where a large number of small jurisdictions compete for mobile firms and households by supplying local public goods and factors. Jurisdictions only have an incomplete set of tax instruments at their disposal to achieve an efficient allocation. We derive second-best behavioral rules for local governments and extend optimal taxation results to the local level. Local governments distort locational decisions of mobile firms and households by taxing them above marginal congestion costs so as to balance relative locational distortions between taxes. The analysis also reveals that there is a systematic difference between the provision of local public goods and factors. While local public goods are provided according to the Samuelson rule in most situations considered, local public factors are undersupplied relative to this rule.     

少数民族大学生思想政治教育探析

少数民族大学生的思想政治状况如何,直接关系着民族地方和国家和谐稳定的实现程度。复杂的国际环境、广泛的国内社会变革、少数民族大学生的民族宗教传统和其自身的特点以及网络等新媒介的快速发展,都给少数民族大学生思想政治教育带来了挑战。因此,我们必须在生产力发展的基础上处理好社会的各种物质利益矛盾,结合地方特点融入社会主义核心价值体系建设,创新少数民族思想政治教育教学的形式和畅通少数民族大学生的利益表达机制。     

高职思想政治教育有效性发挥的困境及出路

以高职教育培养目标的视角重新认识高职思想政治教育有效性的起点和内涵,总结高职思想政治教育的成果与经验,分析存在的问题,揭示高职思想政治教育有效性发挥的困境,探索提高高职思想政治教育有效性的出路。     

如何实现当前大学生思想政治教育创新的思考

创新教育是二十一世纪高等教育的重要任务.学生思想政治教育作为高等教育的重要组成部分,面对新世纪,必然提出学生思想政治教育创新的新课题.思想政治教育创新在高校教育中具有促进学生全面发展'培养学生竞争意识、形成学生团队精神、激发学生创造能力的作用.通过机制、内容和方法的创新来实现学生思想政治教育的全面创新.     

Government ownership,audit firm size and audit pricing: Evidence from China

The present study provides empirical evidence on the impact of government ownership on audit pricing behaviour based on data from Chinese listed companies between 2001 and 2008. Our findings, having controlled for auditor choice, indicate that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) incur significantly lower audit fees than non-SOEs. The results also reveal a significant interaction between the type of SOE (i.e., owned by central vs. local government) and audit firm size, which also affects audit fees. More specifically, large auditors tend to charge the central-SOEs lower audit fees than local-SOEs (province, city and county), while small auditors charge central-SOEs higher fees than local-SOEs. We explore a political economy rationale from a supply-side perspective in explaining the results.     

Political connections and preferential lending at local level: Some evidence from the Italian credit market

We investigate the effect of political connections in Italy, for each level of government, on the credit markets and we find robust evidence that politically connected firms benefit from lower interest rates when the political link is at a local level. Our results show that this preferential treatment is stronger when connected firms borrow from banks with politicians on their boards and when the degree of autonomy granted to local loan officers is higher. The latter result provides a novel addition to the literature on the effects of the delegation of lending decisions within the bank. We also show that the effect is stronger in geographical areas where the incidence of corruption is higher. Overall, our results show that on aggregate the impact of political connections on interest rates is limited but it may rise significantly in specific (local) situations due to a combination of factors such as the delegation of lending decisions, a weaker rule of law and some governance characteristics of banks.     

深化大学生思想道德建设的思考

培养什么人,如何培养人,是高等教育的一个重大课题。在新的形势下,大学生的思想政治状况究竟如何?大学生思想教育究竟面临什么样的挑战?如何切实加强大学生思想政治教育工作?是我们作为高校教师特别是专门从事学生管理工作的教师应该重视和思考的问题。     

地区竞争、支出责任下移与地方政府债务扩张

地方政府债务过度扩张容易引发系统性经济风险。本文通过一个地方政府举债行为理论模型,分析了政府间共同事权的支出责任下移、竞争性地区的举债行为对地方政府债务规模的影响。在此基础上构建空间面板计量模型,利用279个地级市数据进行回归分析,结果表明:地方政府债务扩张是支出责任下移与标尺竞争机制共同驱动的结果;政府间支出责任下移造成的财政压力是地方政府被动负债的重要原因;地方政府间的标尺竞争使其在举债融资行为上表现为明显的策略模仿;各地区在债务扩张的主因上存在异质性,东部地区政府债务的增加主要是地区间竞争的结果。这意味着化解地方政府债务风险不仅应规范政府间财政支出责任划分,更重要的是完善地方政府的政绩考核体系和违规举债的问责机制。     

Assessing financial reporting comparability across institutional settings: The case of pension accounting

The drive for comparability of financial information is to enable users to distinguish similarities and differences in economic activities for an entity over time and between entities so that their resource allocation decisions are facilitated. With the increased globalisation of economic activities, the enhanced international comparability of financial statements is often used as an argument to advance the convergence of local accounting standards to international financial reporting standards (IFRS). Differences in the underlying economic substance of transactions between jurisdictions plus accounting standards allowing alternative treatments may render this expectation of increased comparability unrealistic. Motivated by observations that, as a construct, comparability is under-researched and not well understood, we develop a comparability framework that distinguishes between four types of comparability. In applying this comparability framework to pension accounting in the Australian and USA contexts, we highlight a dilemma: while regulators seek to increase the likelihood that similar events are accounted for similarly, an unintended consequence may be that preparers are forced to apply similar accounting treatment to events that are, in substance, different.