Finnish municipalities enjoy ample fiscal autonomy and provide or arrange the provision of a large share of public services. In recent years, their spending and debt has been increasing steadily, especially because of population ageing and increases in the cost of health care and social...

I compare the impact of local tax revenue and royalties from the extraction of natural resources on governance in Colombian municipalities, leveraging plausibly exogenous variation from cadastral updates and fluctuations in the world price of oil. Higher tax revenue has a larger effect on local...

While numerous studies analyse the determinants of the level and composition of local public spending, little attention has been given to what shapes the choice of tax instruments used by decentralised governments. This paper bridges this gap by investigating the economic and political...

I exploit an exogenous reform introducing a local business tax in Portugal to study tax mimicking among jurisdictions. The identification strategy relies on a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences methodology and heterogeneity in treatment intensity. Results provide evidence of...

This paper studies the role of technology in local-government tax collection capacity in the developing world. We first conduct a new census of all local governments in Ghana to document a strong association between technology use and property tax billing, collection and enforcement. We then...

This paper is concerned with fiscal 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 affect the local tax base. The results support the...

This paper uses Nebraska sales tax data to estimate the magnitude of cross-border shopping in response to travel cost when a local sales tax changes. The results indicate that a one percent increase in a local sales tax induces cross-border shopping by 4.81 percent in a city that has an adjacent...

I exploit an exogenous reform introducing a local business tax in Portugal to study tax mimicking among jurisdictions. The identification strategy relies on a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences methodology and heterogeneity in treatment intensity. Results show evidence of significant...

This paper analyzes mobility responses to a large, regressive local income tax cut benefiting the top 1% in the Swiss Canton of Obwalden in 2006. DiD estimations comparing Obwalden with neighboring cantons confirm that the reform was successful in increasing the share of rich taxpayers in the...