Fiscal federalism and local public finance: A computable general equilibrium (CGE) framework

This paper attempts to make an argument for the feasibility and usefulness of a computable general equilibrium approach to studying fiscal federalism and local public finance. It begins by presenting a general model of fiscal federalism that has at its base a local public goods model with (1) multiple types of mobile agents who are endowed with preferences, private good endowments, and land endowments, (2) local governments that produce local public goods funded by a property tax, and (3) a land market that capitalizes local policies to equilibrate supply and demand. To this, a state (or national) government producing a state public good is added, and all levels of government abide by majority rule voting. A computable general equilibrium framework is derived from this theoretical model and calibrated to New Jersey micro tax data. It has been applied elsewhere to study the dominance of property in local tax bases as well as the general equilibrium effects of state or national intergovernmental programs such as redistributive grants in aid, district power equalization, and the deductibility of local taxes. Results in these areas are summarized and potential future applications discussed.     

Tax Competition and International Public Goods

A well known result in the tax competition literature is that tax rates are set too low in the Nash equilibrium to finance an efficient level of public consumption goods. In this model we introduce international spillovers in public goods provision and show that such spillovers reduce, and in the limiting case of perfect spillovers, eliminate tax competition. There is, however, always underprovision of the public good in equilibrium, since larger spillovers increase the problem of free riding. In an extension to the model, we demonstrate that congestion costs may result in overprovision of the public good.     

Tax Competition, Income Differentials and Local Public Services

This paper examines strategic tax setting between fiscal authorities in the presence of mobile workers who locate across these jurisdictions in response to differing tax structures and congestable local public amenities. We find that the nature of the tax setting outcomes depend crucially on the proximity between cities. For distant cities with the same size populations, the pressure on tax rates of a more mobile workforce depends on the whether mobile workers are net beneficiaries or net contributors. If mobile workers are either high or low income earners, cities lower tax rates. If mobile workers are middle income earners, cities raise tax rates. For close or neighbouring cities, workers locate in one of the cities and tax rates and local public amenities are dispersed.     

Interregional redistribution through tax surcharge

The paper considers a utilitarian federal government that levies a tax to finance a national public good or to effect a redistributive policy. Regions differ in their incomes and in their preferences for a local public good. First, we assume that the central government observes each region's public expenditures (and, hence, local tax revenues) but cannot perfectly observe revenues and preferences. We derive the (constrained) Pareto-efficient allocation and show how it can be implemented by a surcharge on local taxes. The level of redistribution that can be achieved is limited by the fact that it may be difficult, or even impossible, to distinguish low-income regions with a high preference for the public good from high-income regions with a low preference. Then we allow for the possibility that the central government can observe incomes through a costly audit. We examine the optimal audit policy and study the impact of audits on the optimal taxation scheme. Throughout the paper we focus on the properties of average and marginal tax rates and on the resulting under- or overprovision of regional public goods.     

Two Games of Interjurisdictional Competition When Local Governments Provide Industrial Public Goods

In this paper we investigate two different games of interjurisdictional competition when local governments provide public goods that benefit industry. Governments play a game either in tax rates on mobile industrial capital or in public expenditures. Although the literature suggests that competition in public expenditures is more competitive than in tax rates, this is not necessarily true in the case of industrial public goods. Moreover, in the presence of industrial public goods interjurisdictional competition may also lead to overprovision of public services.     

财政竞争、地方政府政策选择与经济增长——基于中国省际面板数据的实证研究

分税制背景下财政分权体制使得地方政府之间存在着激烈的财政竞争,其典型特征表现为税负、公共投入支出和公共服务支出三种政策工具之间的策略互动,从而影响各地区的经济增长。基于1997～2009年中国省级面板数据,通过估计交互项系数的符号,结果发现:地方政府的三种政策工具是相辅相成的;交互项的作用也存在着地区的差异;税负、公共服务支出和公共投入支出对经济增长有着不同的边际影响。     

Optimal fiscal policy under multiple equilibria

We study optimal fiscal policy in an economy where (i) search frictions create a coordination problem and generate multiple, Pareto-ranked equilibria and (ii) the government finances the provision of a public good by taxing market activity. The government must choose the tax rate before it knows which equilibrium will obtain, and therefore an important part of the problem is determining how the policy will affect the equilibrium selection process. We show that when the equilibrium selection rule is based on the concept of risk dominance, higher tax rates make coordination on the Pareto-superior outcome less likely. As a result, taking equilibrium-selection effects into account leads to a lower optimal tax rate.     

Private Equity and Local Public Finances

We study the economic impact of private equity (PE) investments on local governments, which are important corporate stakeholders. Examining over 11,000 deals and private firm data in Europe, we document that target firms' effective tax rates and total tax expenses decrease by 15% and 13% after PE deals. At the same time, target firms expand their capital expenditures and firm boundaries, but do not increase employment. Using administrative data on the public finances of German municipalities and exploiting the geographical and time-series variation in PE deals, we document that PE activity is negatively associated with local governments' tax revenues and spending. This result is likely driven by reduced tax payments of PE portfolio firms, accompanied by only modest positive spillovers of PE investments on regional economic growth. Collectively, our findings suggest that corporate tax efficiency serves as a cost-cutting channel in the PE sector and constrains the finances of local governments.     

Shared Tax Sources and Public Expenditures

This paper deals with a specific vertical assignment of public functions in a federation: Two levels of government share both the same tax source and expenditure on a productivity increasing public service. We consider surplus maximizing Leviathan governments which provide public services in order to increase their potential tax base. The Nash equilibrium is characterized by overtaxation and relative to surplus maximization—depending on whether or not the public goods are sufficiently complementary with the entire tax base—either underprovision or overprovision of the public service. The implications of these results, in terms of welfare and potential use for earmarking taxes are also considered.     

An index of capital tax competition

If very specific assumptions are made about the production technology (output per worker is a quadratic function of the capital/labor ratio), people’s preferences (identical within any jurisdiction; linear in private good consumption and in public expenditure per capita), and capital supply (fixed), then equilibrium tax rates can be derived in closed form when jurisdictions choose their source-based tax rates on capital noncooperatively. The focus of this paper is how the size distribution of the population of the different jurisdictions affects equilibrium tax rates. It is shown that the (population-weighted) average tax rate is determined by a (relatively) simple index, which must increase as the population distribution becomes more concentrated. The effects of tax harmonization by some subset of the jurisdictions can then be analyzed. Any tax harmonization by a group of jurisdictions must benefit residents of all jurisdictions not in the group. It must also benefit residents of the largest jurisdiction in the group, and must increase the average payoff of all residents of the group of jurisdictions doing the harmonizing.     

Local property tax differences and business real estate values

This article posits a model of the effect of differences in changes in local property tax rates on changes in the business real estate tax base. It is also hypothesized that changes in the tax base influence changes in the property tax rate. Empirical findings for metropolitan Chicago are that both differences in property tax changes and levels have large effects on the growth of the value of business real estate. Also, changes in the property tax rate are found to depend upon changes in the tax base as well as the property tax level and its previous change.     

Testing for Vertical Fiscal Externalities

The purpose of this paper is to design a test of whether the vertical external effects associated with tax base sharing among local and regional governments have become internalized via the intergovernmental transfer system. Such tests are important in the sense that the income tax rates chosen by different levels of government will generally be correlated, even if the resource allocation is optimal from society's point of view. By using panel data for the Swedish local and regional public sectors, the results imply that an increase in the regional income tax rate induces the municipalities in the region to decrease their income tax rates. In addition, we are able to reject the null hypothesis that the vertical external effects have become internalized.     

Exports,foreign direct investment,and the costs of corporate taxation

This paper develops a model of a monopolistically competitive industry with extensive and intensive investment and shows how these margins respond to changes in average and marginal corporate tax rates. Intensive investment refers to the size of a firm’s capital stock. Extensive investment refers to the firm’s production location and reflects the trade-off between exports and foreign direct investment as alternative modes of foreign market access. The paper derives comparative static effects of the corporate tax and shows how the cost of public funds depends on the measures of effective marginal and average tax rates and on the elasticities of extensive and intensive investment. The paper was presented in 2006 at the German public finance meeting in Giessen; the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna; the ESF/CEPR Workshop on Outsourcing, Migration and the European Economy in Rome; the University of St. Gallen; the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva, and in 2007 at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC, the CESifo Area Conference in Public Sector Economics in Munich and the 63rd IIPF Congress in Warwick. I appreciate stimulating comments by Michael Devereux and seminar participants and, in particular, by the discussants Andreas Haufler and Nadine Riedl, an anonymous referee and the editor Richard Cornes.     

Optimal redistributive tax and education policies in general equilibrium

This paper studies optimal linear and non-linear income taxes and education subsidies in two-type models with endogenous human capital formation, endogenous labor supply, and endogenous wage rates. Assuming constant human capital elasticities, human capital investment should be efficient under optimal linear policies, whether general equilibrium effects are present or not. Hence, education subsidies should not be used for distributional reasons. Due to general equilibrium effects, optimal linear income taxes may even become negative. Optimal non-linear policies exploit general equilibrium effects for redistribution. The high-skilled type optimally has a negative marginal income tax rate and a positive marginal education subsidy. The low-skilled type optimally faces a positive marginal income tax rate and a marginal tax on education. Simulations demonstrate that general equilibrium effects have only a modest effect on optimal non-linear policies.     

The revenue and base effects of local tax hikes: evidence from a quasi-experiment

Due to a reform of the local equalization scheme in 2003, a set of municipalities in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) increased their local property and business tax rates by one to two percentage points, while the remaining municipalities kept their rates constant. I use this variation across municipalities and over time to study the revenue and base effects of local property and business tax hikes in a generalized difference-in-differences design. The results suggest that the property tax hikes had even in the long-run a revenue elasticity of unity. Accordingly, I find no adverse effects on property tax bases. For the business tax, I find no significant effects on revenues and bases. Furthermore, there are also no effects on broader economic outcomes such as local employment, firms’ wage bill, and property prices. Overall, increasing local tax rates by one to two percentage points does not seem to affect the local economy adversely.

     

Reciprocity in Corporate Tax Compliance—Evidence from Ozone Pollution

In a tax—public goods reciprocity framework between citizens and the state, managers view taxes as a payment to the government in exchange for public goods, and hence they adjust their willingness to pay taxes as public good quality changes. We show that corporate tax planning intensity increases with ground-level ozone pollution. Revisions in ozone pollution regulations cause counties that failed the revised and more stringent standards to reduce ozone pollution. Consequently, firms headquartered in these counties reduced corporate tax planning intensity relative to firms in other counties. The ozone-tax link varies in the predicted directions with public attention to pollution, potential welfare loss due to ozone, managers’ stakeholder orientation, taxpayers’ polluting status, political preferences, and civic norms. We also find consistent results for Superfund cleanups of hazardous waste sites. Our research sheds light on reciprocity as a potential mechanism influencing corporate tax compliance.     

Profit tax competition and formula apportionment

We analyze corporate income tax competition with international capital mobility when the common tax base is allocated to governments according to an apportionment formula. Labor can be either internationally mobile or immobile. We compare the Nash equilibria for different apportionment methods. Tax competition produces lower tax rates the more elastically the formula share responds to tax rate changes. More specifically, equilibrium tax rates are typically lowest when apportionment is based on property-shares, followed by payroll- and sales-shares apportionment. Compared to their cooperative levels, equilibrium tax rates are too low for property-share apportionment but tend to be too high for the other formulas. JEL Classification H77 · H25 · F23     

Indirect tax harmonization and global public goods

This paper identifies conditions under which, starting from any tax-distorting equilibrium, destination- and origin-based indirect tax-harmonizing reforms are potentially Pareto improving in the presence of global public goods. The first condition (unrequited transfers between governments) requires that transfers are designed in such a way that the marginal valuations of the global public goods are equalized, whereas the second (conditional revenue changes) requires that the change in global tax revenues, as a consequence of tax harmonization, is consistent with the under/over-provision of global public goods relative to the (modified) Samuelson rule. Under these conditions, tax harmonization results in redistributing the gains from a reduction in global deadweight loss and any changes in global tax revenues according to the Pareto principle. And this is the case independently of the tax principle in place (destination or origin).     

Tax Reform and Employment in Europe

The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extent modifications of tax systems between 1985 and 1992 within major parts of the European Union contributed to changes in the labour market. The principal countries under investigation are Germany, Italy, France and the United Kingdom, and the method of investigation is the numerical simulation of a multi-country general equilibrium model. Changes in VAT rates and in the personal income tax schedule are investigated. We conclude that a non-trivial part of the labour market changes may be due to reactions of the market to changes in these tax rates.     

How to stop the race to the bottom

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.