Inter-country equity in the taxation of IP is a contentious issue. With its BEPS initiative, the OECD aims at taxing in accordance with value creation even though there are admitted difficulties in determining the actual place of value creation. The European Commission promotes the introduction...

In this work we simulate the effects of tax autonomy of the Austrian states on the levels of public employment in each state. We show that depending on the strength of the public sector lobby, tax autonomy would require reduction of employment in the public sector between 25% and 35% of the...

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...

We analyze the competition in bonus taxation when banks compensate their managers by means of fixed and incentive pay and bankers are internationally mobile. Banks choose bonus payments that induce excessive managerial risk-taking to maximize their private benefits of existing government bailout...

Rapid growth in e-commerce has altered the ability of jurisdictions to enforce commodity taxes on a destination basis. This results in different effective tax rates depending on the way in which goods and services are purchased and the characteristics of both the products and the sellers. We...

The increasing level of competition for foreign direct investment (FDI) in the 1990s triggered many countries to offer various fiscal incentives. Specifically, many Asian countries persistently keep their tax rates competitive. To empirically investigate the relationship between the two...

Households may migrate between jurisdictions to secure preferred mixes of collectively sup-plied services and taxation. But devolution of taxes to sub-national jurisdictions could reduce expected tax revenue if some move to lower tax regimes, constraining devolved government policy. This paper...

Building on the literature of the political economy of taxation, this article explores the relationship between political competition and tax revenues using a sample of 89 developing countries from 1988 to 2010. Owing to the inertia of tax variables, we estimate a dynamic panel data model using...

In response to mounting international pressure to reform the ring-fenced elements of its tax system, the Swiss government has put forward a comprehensive tax reform package. The proposal comprises the introduction of a license box, a substantial reduction in cantonal pro t tax rates, and an...

The implications of high indebtedness for strategic tax setting in internationally integrated capital markets have found little attention so far. We analyze when and how changes in initial debt levels affect the distribution of economic activity across space. When public borrowing is...

This paper challenges the view that tax base equalization by the so-called Representative Tax System (RTS) removes inefficient undertaxation in corporate tax competition. The innovation of the paper is that it focuses on a tax on corporate income, instead of the unit tax on capital considered in...

The existing theoretical literature on fiscal competition has to a large extent ignored the role of government debt as a determinant of taxes and productive public spending. We develop a simple model of fiscal competition with government borrowing. If a default on government debt is no option,...

Die Unternehmenssteuerreform III stellt das Schweizer Steuersystem auf ein neues Fundament. Auf Druck der OECD und der G20 soll die tiefere Besteuerung von ausländischen Unternehmensgewinnen in der Schweiz abgeschafft werden. Das Bassin lémanique ist Standort zahlreicher globaler Konzerne, die...

This paper models the migration of the Creative Class (Florida, 2003) in a New-Economic-Geography framework. Beside wage differentials, urban cultural amenities play an important role on the choice of location. A public cultural good, financed by taxes, is introduced as an agglomeration force....

This paper proposes measures to quantify the effective level and the effective progressivity of taxation in a fiscally decentralized country taking income sorting into account. Using data on the universe of Swiss taxpayers, we find that rich households effectively face significantly lower...

We extend the literature on local income tax competition by allowing for inter-jurisdictional spillovers and imperfect rivalry in consumption of a publicly provided good. Comparing decentralized second-best results of a theoretical model with an efficient benchmark, we identify three...

Die neue Regionalstudie der Credit Suisse fokussiert auf sechs Wirtschaftsregionen südlich des Juragebirges. Diese erstrecken sich über die Kantone Solothurn und Bern und umfassen die Achse Solothurn-Grenchen-Biel und die Satelliten Balsthal, Langenthal und Lyss. Trotz dem hohen Druck, der auf...

Dilemmas of tax policy in a globalized economy -- Global planners and strategic players -- The tax treaties myth -- Costs of multilateral cooperation -- Cooperation and its discontents -- International tax and global justice -- Perfecting the international tax market

In this paper, commuting is introduced to a federal economy where benevolent lower-level (state) governments levy an ad valorem tax on labour income. This results in inefficiently low levels of taxation, even when households as a whole do not migrate. Indeed, rather than attracting more workers...

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...

An ongoing debate in the tax competition literature is the desirability for a system of countries, or regions, to restrict the preferential treatment of different forms of capital. A widespread belief is that without such restrictions, countries would aggressively compete for mobile capital,...

The article deals with the issue of tax decentralization to local government. The aim of the article is to describe the tax decentralization to local governments with respect to its possible determinants and to verify empirically the relevancy of theoretical factors generally explaining fiscal...

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 discusses trends in capital taxation and the role of the corporate tax rate in a welfare state. It provides a summary of the tax competition literature with special application to capital taxation in small versus large countries. A main finding from this literature is that small...

This paper exploits detailed information on local political and socioeconomic networks and a reform of local fiscal equalization in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) to identify the role of learning in local tax rate interactions. Using this policy change in spatial lag IV regressions, we find that...

Corporate tax levels have fallen substantially in Europe during the last decades. A broad literature has identified tax competition as one reason for this decline in corporate tax levels. However, none of these studies explicitly asks the question whether tax competition within regions is...

I analyze the dynamic effects of tax competition on public budget deficits. I find that stronger tax competition leads to a fiscal deficit bias at the early stages of financial liberalization. When countries differ in terms of capital mobility, further liberalization leads to external imbalances...

State borders create a discontinuous tax treatment of retail sales. In a Nash game, local tax rates will be higher on the low-state-tax side of a border. Local taxes will decrease from the nearest high-tax border and increase from the low-tax border. Using driving time from state borders and all...

This paper investigates the conditions under which partial harmonization for capital taxation is sustained in a repeated interactions model of tax competition when there are three countries with heterogenous capital endowments. We show that regardless of the structure of the coalition (i.e. full...

IP boxes or patent boxes can be introduced so as to promote research and development (R&D) activities or attract mobile IP assets, but they can also cause harmful tax competition. Action 5 of BEPS project has analysed this problem and proposes the application of a ‘nexus approach’ that...

This article investigates a tax competition model where countries compete for capital and profits of multinational enterprises (MNEs) through statutory tax rates and cross-border loss-offset provisions, which allow a transfer of foreign subsidiaries’ losses to the parent company. A joint...

I propose a model of income redistribution in an open-economy environment. The world consists of a finite number of countries whose governments seek to maximize the welfare of their low-skilled populations by taxing skilled workers' labor income. While tax competition limits the extent to which...