This paper examines capital tax competition in the presence of an interstate transfer policy without federal commitment. Lack of commitment implies that tax policy is chosen prior to federal transfers. The paper s main result is that ex-post federal policy internalizes horizontal fiscal...

This paper examines capital tax competition in the presence of an interstate transfer policy without federal commitment. Lack of commitment implies that tax policy is chosen prior to federal transfers. The paper's main result is that ex-post federal policy internalizes horizontal fiscal...

The success of European monetary integration-what the editors of this CESifo volume call "one of the most far-reaching, real world experiments in monetary policy to date"-is not assured. Policy makers have been forced to deal with challenges posed by formulating a uniform monetary policy for...

Forward looking measures like the well-known effective marginal tax rate developed by King and Fullerton (1984) are often criticized for not taking into account the complexity of the tax law. This paper derives a method of evaluating this kind of measure and of quantifying the bias resulting...

The standard tax theory result that investment should not be distorted is based on the assumption that profits are locally bound. In this paper we analyze the optimal tax policy when firms are internationally mobile. We show that the optimal policy response to increasing firm mobility may be...

In this paper, we analyze tax competition in a model where investor firms have the choice between two types of investment, greenfield investment and mergers and acquisitions. We show that the coexistence of these two types of investment intensifies tax competition in comparison to the case where...

Previous literature widely assumes that taxes are optimized in local public finance while expenditures adjust residually. This paper endogenizes the choice of the optimization variable. In particular, it analyzes how federal policy toward local governments influences the way local governments...

Empirical evidence suggests that people dislike ads in media products like TV programs. In such situations standard economic theory prescribes that the advertising volume can be optimally reduced by levying a tax on ads. However, making use of recent advances in the theory of Industrial...

The success of the flat rate tax in Eastern Europe suggests that this concept could also be a model for the welfare states of Western Europe. The present paper uses a simulation model to analyse the effects of revenue neutral flat rate tax reforms on equity and efficiency for the case of...