In this paper we study the regional pattern of municipal business property tax rates in the province of British Columbia. Reduced form tax setting equations produce some evidence that municipal governments respond to tax changes in neighboring jurisdictions. However, a joint investigation of the determinants of tax base and municipal taxation decisions reveals that it is difficult to interpret ...

HE U.S. Congress has recently passed historic legislation that revises the fundamental structure of U.S. income tax law. Promoters of this legislation hope that the new tax system will encourage more productive use of economic resources and faster economic growth. Economists disagree very little about the general objectives of tax refor-m. The new law, however, has drawn significant criticism, ...

HE U.S. Congress has recently passed historic legislation that revises the fundamental structure of U.S. income tax law. Promoters of this legislation hope that the new tax system will encourage more productive use of economic resources and faster economic growth. Economists disagree very little about the general objectives of tax refor-m. The new law, however, has drawn significant criticism, ...

This paper examines the effect of public acquisitions of open space on 1 changes in house prices and the municipal tax base using municipal-level data from 2 New Jersey. We find that open-space expenditures yield a stream of benefits in the 3 future but that any effect of open-space acquisitions on the tax base is immediate. 4 Finally, we find that while higher tax rates are associated with a l...

It is suggested that instead of attempting to adjust the consumer price index (CPI) after tax reform it is better to measure changes in after-tax income.

This paper uses a panel of individual tax returns and the ‘bracket creep’ as source of tax rate variation to construct instrumental variables estimates of the sensitivity of income to changes in tax rates. From 1979 to 1981, the US income tax schedule was fixed in nominal terms while inflation was high (around 10%). This produced a real change in tax rate schedules. Taxpayers near the top-end o...

This paper incorporates costly migration into the empirical literature on the incidence on wages of states and local taxes. The responsiveness of pre-tax wages to changes in state and local taxes (including income, sales and property taxes) is shown to vary by age and education. Using repeated cross-section and pseudo-panel regressions, the paper shows that the pre-tax wages of highly-educated ...

No public policy issue is more important than the structure and level of taxes. Governments have fallen because of tax reform. Proposals to extend the value-added tax (VAT) or increase its rates have caused po liti cal agitation in many countries, including Ec ua dor and Mexico. In many less-developed countries, a shortage of funds impedes development eff orts, yet attempts to increase tax reve...

32 Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta E C O N O M I C R E V I E W Third Quarter 1998 The ensuing debate about limits of credit union membership has extended, quite naturally, to credit union tax status (see, for example, Bickley 1997; McConnell 1998; Robinson 1998). Meanwhile, the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate have overwhelmingly passed and the President has signed a bill that would sub...

This short paper provides an example which shows that the type of the spillover effect from one individual to another (and hence whether we under-tax, or overtax, in a Nash equilibrium relative to a cooperative one) can be reversed when we introduce dynamics into a model with public goods. Specifically, the spillover effect changes from positive (which is the static, traditional case) to negati...