Private innovative activities receive public innovation support from different political levels. Few studies have empirically evaluated the influence of political systems on the reception of public innovation support and no other studies have evaluated innovation support across Europe with CIS...

This paper studies the revenue and base effects of local property and business tax hikes using a natural experiment in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). Due to a reform of the local equalization scheme in 2003, a set of municipalities in NRW increased their local tax rates by one...

This paper exploits an exogenous reform of the local fiscal equalization scheme in the German State of North Rhine-Westphalia to identify tax mimicking by municipalities in the neighboring state of Lower Saxony. The spatial lag regressions provide no evidence for the existence of strategic...

This paper studies whether higher level governments treat politically aligned municipalities differently than unaligned ones when they provide special discretionary transfers to resolve acute fiscal problems (special needs transfers). By implementing a regression discontinuity design with a...

This paper uses the quasi-experiment of Germanyś reunification to identify local tax mimicking by municipalities in Eastern-Germany. After reunification, East-German municipalities were allowed to independently set, for the first time in decades, local business and property tax rates. I explore...

This paper studies the effect of an online retailer on spatial tax competition with mobile consumers. Under non-cooperative Leviathan governments, tax treatment of online purchases according to the destination principle mitigates tax competition; tax treatment of online purchases of online...

This paper studies the effect of an online retailer on spatial tax competition with cross-border shopping. For low fixed cost of online shopping, the online retailer is active in both markets and tax rates are higher in the online equilibrium than in the online equilibrium. For intermediate...

This paper studies the effect of an online retailer on spatial tax competition with mobile consumers. If taxation for online purchases follows the destination principle, the entry of the online retailer mitigates tax competition; if taxation for online purchases follows the origin principle, the...