Local governments in the United States typically rely on several main sources of own-source revenues, including individual income taxes, general sales taxes, specific excise taxes, fees and charges, and local property taxes. Of these sources, the dominant is by far the property tax. According to the United States Census Bureau (http://www.census.gov/govs/estimate), local property taxes accounte...

This paper models voters’ preferences over central versus local education policies when there are private alternatives. Education is financed by income taxes and individuals are mobile between communities. Public education levels are chosen by majority vote. Contrary to conventional wisdom, centralisation may benefit the rich and poor, while the middle class prefer decentralised education. The ...

In this paper we examine the impact on the salaries of free agents in Major League Baseball of differences in state and local individual income taxes between major league cities, in an attempt to see if income taxes affect player salaries. Our basic specification suggests that each percentage point of an income tax raises free agent salaries by $21 to $24 thousand; other estimates indicate even...

This articles studies the optimal tax mix (taxes on income and commodities) under asymmetric information in a two-type model, when individuals make relative consumption comparisons. The model includes both positional and nonpositional goods, taking into account the fact that relative concerns matter for some but not for all commodities. We nd that in general the whole tax system is a ected by t...

Shifting of income between the corporate and the personal income tax bases in response to tax incentives is the premise of the literature on taxation and organizational form. Empirical evidence of income shifting is, however, merely circumstantial. Using a unique panel of highfrequency VAT data from Israel, we trace the footprints of income-shifting through incorporation by high-income individu...

We use a 1985-2005 panel of state data to investigate the relative tax base elasticities of two major US state taxes—corporate income taxes and sales taxes—with respect to changes in their tax rates. We focus on these two taxes because they are essentially flat-rate taxes at the state level, making it relatively straightforward to construct estimates of their bases using aggregate collections a...

malaysia, as a small and developing country, must reduce carbon emissions because the country is one of the top co2-emitting countries in the asean region. therefore, the current study implements two environmental tax policies; carbon and energy taxes, in order to examine the impacts of these policies on the reduction of carbon emission in the whole of the economy by applying a computable gener...

We examine the relative dynamic responses of state personal tax revenues and sales tax bases to changes in state personal income. Our econometric analysis, which includes separate analyses of long-run and short-run dynamics for each state, permits the estimation of asymmetric short-run responses depending upon the relationship between current and expected tax base growth. Results indicate that ...

Relative consumption effects or status concerns that feature jealousy (in the sense of Dupor and Liu, AER 2003) boost consumption expenditure. If consumption is financed by labour income, such status considerations increase labour supply and, hence, the tax base. A higher taxable income, in turn, can make tax evasion more attractive. We show for various specifications of preferences that the ta...