This paper examines whether policies to promote foreign direct investment (FDI) make economic sense. The discussion focuses on whether existing academic research suggests that the benefits of FDI are sufficient to justify the kind of policy interventions seen in practice. For small open economies, efficient taxation of foreign and domestic capital depends on their relative mobility. If foreign ...

Revenue sharing can be used to discourage low tax regions from competing for capital and firms with high tax regions. However, with heterogeneous regions, revenue sharing involves net transfers across regions and creates a “moral-hazard” problem – that is, regions may want to invest less in market fostering public good when the benefits are shared across nations. This paper analyzes these costs...

This paper is concerned with scal externalities arising from local taxation of a mobile factor. Using a panel of more 1100 local jurisdictions it provides empirical evidence on how the local tax rate as well as the tax rate in the neighborhood a ect the local tax base. The results support the existence of scal externalities: an increase in the tax rate of local neighbors exerts a positive e ect...

The return on a bond investment comes from three sources: Interest payments, realized capital gains and accrued capital gains. We provide an exact description on how the capital gains can be measured under a variety of accounting rules for measuring accruals and study the theoretical properties of such rules, their taxation consequences and the relation between the yield before tax and the yiel...

Within a two-sector-two-country model of trade with aggregate scale economies and unionisation, a more generous welfare state in one country increases welfare in that country and can have positive spillover effects on the other. Furthermore, synchronised expansions of social security are more welfare enhancing than unilateral ones. Our results counter the fears that a race to the bottom in soci...

This paper proposes three models of social capital and growth that incorporate different perspectives on the concept of social capital and the empirical evidence gathered to date. In these models, social capital impacts growth by assisting in the accumulation of human capital, by affecting financial development through its effects on collective trust and social norms, and by facilitating networ...

The past academic literature on tax policy has focused almost entirely on the analysis of tax structures in the richest countries, particularly the U.S. Overall the optimal tax models explain reasonably well the observed tax policies in these countries. As summarized in Gordon (2000), for example, past theoretical work suggests that taxes on consumption or labor income should dominate use of ca...

The past academic literature on tax policy has focused almost entirely on the analysis of tax structures in the richest countries, particularly the U.S. Overall the optimal tax models explain reasonably well the observed tax policies in these countries. As summarized in Gordon (2000), for example, past theoretical work suggests that taxes on consumption or labor income should dominate use of ca...

We determine su cient conditions to establish the supermodularity of a n asymmetric country tax competition, when countries maximize their tax revenue. Using a notion of generalized concavity, namelyρ−concavity, we establish that the tax competition game is supermodular when the marginal production function of each country is log-concave and 1/2-convex. Alternative su cient conditions for the s...

We re-examine, from a political economy perspective, the standard view that higher capital mobility results in lower capital taxes a view, in fact, that is not confirmed by the available empirical evidence. We show that when a small economy is opened to capital mobility, the change of incidence of a tax on capital from capital owners to owners of the immobile factor may interact in such a way w...