Fiscal externalities across jurisdictions can arise from imperfect tax enforcement and the avoidance behavior of taxpayers. Base shifting to low tax jurisdictions tends to generate positive fiscal externalities, while understating the overall tax liability leads to negative fiscal externalities when the tax base is apportioned across jurisdictions. While much of the literature has focused on ba...

A simple theory suggests that a common form of federal horizontal equalization grants should cause subnational governments to levy higher tax rates, distorting local tax bases and so increasing federal transfers. To test this, I examine Canadian provincial tax policies in the 1972-2002 period. Consistent with the theory, provinces respond to expansions of equalization transfers by increasing th...

Recent international agreements on tax data sharing aim to facilitate residence based taxation of capital and thus mitigate tax competition. I show that residence based capital tax rates can still decline with the number of financially integrated countries when public spending and debt are used strategically. While suboptimal in the steady state, strategic policies persist during transition if ...

Toder for helpful comments. The findings and conclusions contained within are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of the Tax Policy Center or its funders. ii ABSTRACT We examine how tax policies alter investment incentives, with a particular focus on startup and innovative businesses. Consistent with prior work, we find that existing pol...

We propose a model consistent with two observations. First, the tax rates adopted by different countries are generally uncorrelated with their growth performance. Second, countries that drastically reduce private incentives to invest severely hurt their growth performance. In our model, the effects of taxation on growth are highly nonlinear. Low tax rates have a very small impact on long-run gr...