FUNDAMENTAL TAX REFORM AND STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS

Tax competition among local governments: Evidence from a property tax reform in Finland

a r t i c l e i n f o This paper uses a Finnish policy intervention to study tax competition among local governments. Changes in the statutory lower limits to the property tax rates are used as a source of exogenous variation to estimate the responses of municipalities to tax rates in their neighboring municipalities. I do not find evidence of interdependence in property tax rates among Finnish...

Might Fundamental Tax Reform Increase Criminal Activity?

There is a widely held perception that fundamental tax reform would reduce the level of criminal and other “underground” economic activity. The popular argument relies on the idea that replacing the income tax with a sales tax would implicitly tax the return to criminal activity, whereas the return to crime is effectively untaxed by an income tax. This paper finds instead that the impact of tax...

Simulating Fundamental Tax Reform in the U.S

This paper uses a new, large-scale, dynamic life-cycle simulation model to compare the welfare and macroeconomic effects of five fundamental alternatives to the U.S. federal income tax: a proportional income tax, a proportional consumption tax, a flat tax, a flat tax with transition relief, and a progressive variant of the flat tax called the X tax. The model incorporates intragenerational hete...

Economic Freedom, Economic Growth And Governments Tax Revenue In (MENA)

The tax-spending nexus: Evidence from a panel of US state–local governments

a r t i c l e i n f o JEL classification: H71 H72 C33 Keywords: Tax-spend State and local government Public finance Panel unit root Panel cointegration We reexamine the tax-spending nexus using a panel of 50 US state–local government units between 1963 and 1997. We find that, unlike tax revenues, expenditures adjust to revert back to a long-term equilibrium relationship. The evidence on the sho...