This paper examines the fiscal and extra-fiscal effects of decentralizing the collection of Brazil's rural land tax from the federal level to local governments. Using a difference-in-differences research design, we assess the impact of local tax enforcement on revenue, land use, and...

Council tax is levied on the occupiers of residential property to help fund the provision of local services. Individual Scottish councils set the tax rates for their area, but it is the Scottish Government that determines the tax base to which the tax rates apply. With properties still assigned...

Developing countries often face a cycle where weak tax compliance limits public goods, cutting incentives to pay taxes. We test whether improved local infrastructure can disrupt this cycle, using a randomized street paving experiment in Acayucan, Mexico. Of 56 eligible street projects, 28 were...

This paper analyzes how (local) tax havens function. Using the German municipal business tax setting as a laboratory, I investigate the characteristics and emergence of local tax havens. I demonstrate that local tax havens are situated in close proximity to large agglomeration areas, while...

Municipal budgets represent the basis of the development of an area with a certain number of inhabitants. The quality of life of the population will depend on the size of the budget and the potential for the development of the municipality. The budget system of the Republic of Srpska includes...

The study examined the specific features of using the instruments of financing the economic development of territorial communities on the example of Ukraine. Economic and statistical analysis methods were used to process the data, including the Wilcoxon signed-rank test for comparing growth...

Balán et al. (2022) evaluate the impact of "local elites" involvement in local tax collection in a large city in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Using a randomized controlled trial to vary the identities of tax collectors, they find that local elites' involvement raises tax compliance and...

The objective of this work is to analyze the impact of fiscal decentralization on the behavior of Brazilian municipal policymakers. This work uses the first three cutoffs of the transfer rules of the Municipal Participation Fund (FPM) and applies a regression discontinuity designs (RDD) to...

This study analyzes whether and to what extent the provision of public goods and firms' trust in local governments' handling of local business tax revenues are associated with firms' willingness to pay local business tax. Using survey data on German small- and medium-sized firms, we find that...

Tax revenues are fundamental to state-building and development, particularly in the aftermath of conflict. Through the lens of the recent post-conflict experience of Colombia, this paper explores the challenges of increasing tax revenues amid violence and illicit economic activities. We study...

We investigate the welfare implications of property taxation. We apply a sufficient statistics approach that accounts for the distributional effects of tax changes at the household level within a spatial equilibrium framework. We show that equity effects are driven by price adjustments in the...

Requiring firms, rather than individuals, to remit sales taxes improves tax compliance. In the U.S., this shift toward firm-based remittance rules for remote purchases occurred gradually after South Dakota v. Wayfair. Using comprehensive and high-frequency local sales tax revenue data, we show...

The economic benefits of tourism activity have led Portuguese municipalities to seek new financial resources that allow them to face new public expenses to mitigate the adverse effects of such growth, creating public policies that incorporate those effects. This research aims to analyse existing...

Neben den eigenen Steuereinnahmen bestimmt der kommunale Finanzausgleich die finanzielle Situation der Gemeinden. Die Finanzzuweisungen des Landes erhöhen die Finanzkraft der kommunalen Ebene und bewirken eine gleichmäßigere Verteilung unter den Gemeinden. Der Beitrag analysiert den Einfluss...

Do bigger legislatures lead to bigger government? We exploit a Brazilian reform that allocated the number of municipal council seats based on population thresholds in a regression discontinuity design. We find that larger councils have significantly higher public expenditures on social goods and...

We develop a comprehensive dataset of state and local taxes from 2000–2015 that includes personal income taxes, property taxes, corporate income taxes, sales taxes, estate taxes and excise taxes. We illustrate how state and local taxes have changed over time, over business cycles, and to what...

While administrative resources are thought to generate positive impacts on local economic conditions, most existing investigations of this relationship suffer from endogeneity concerns. Exploiting China’s Relocation Reform policies, we estimate the causal impacts of construction of new...

An international tax haven is usually a low-tax jurisdiction that seeks to attract investment by foreign investors. But, there are many state and local jurisdictions within federal systems that set zero tax rates on personal or corporate income, consumption, property, and wealth in an effort to...

We find that policy decisions made by elected politicians in Portuguese municipalities violate the predictions of standard microeconomic theory. Municipalities can choose a withholding rate between zero and five percent of the income tax revenue collected within their boundaries by the national...

What is the effect of e-commerce on the geographic distribution of local sales tax revenues? Using COVID-19 as a shock to online shopping and hand-collected high-frequency data on local sales tax revenue, we document an important shift in the state and local public finance landscape. As...