Suchergebnisse

We examine policies directed at regulating tobacco consumption through three types of instruments: (i) an excise tax hindering consumption by increasing the price of cigarettes, (ii) prevention programs helping consumers to make choices that are more time consistent when trading-off the current pleasure from smoking and its future health harms, and (iii) smoking bans directly restricting consumption. First, on normative grounds, we focus on the optimal design of public policies maximizing the economy's surplus. Second, in a positive perspective, we investigate how the lobbying activities of the tobacco industry, of smokers, and of anti-tobacco organizations may distort government intervention.

Our aim in this paper is to investigate whether the presence of imperfect income tax compliance affects the optimal provision of public goods within a framework in which public expenditure is financed by a general income tax that also accomplishes redistributive goals. We first derive the income tax structure, and then a generalized Samuelson rule. We argue that, under imperfect income tax compliance, it is desirable to distort public–good supply downwards, in the sense that the sum of marginal rates of substitution between public and private consumption must exceed their marginal rate of transformation.

We setup a model in which the residents of two neighboring municipalities can use the services provided by public infrastructures located in both jurisdictions. If services are either complements or substitutes in use, the municipalities strategically interact when investing in infrastructures; moreover, when they differ in population size, the small municipality reacts more to the expenditure of its neighbor than the big one. The theoretical predictions are then tested by estimating the determinants of the stock of public infrastructures of the municipalities belonging to the Autonomous Province of Trento, in Italy.

We examine the design of fiscal equalization transfers aimed at interregional redistribution in a setting in which special interest groups distort the fiscal policies of local governments. Equity always calls for tax-base equalization while efficiency calls for tax-base equalization of fiscal capacities backed by strong lobby groups and for taxrevenue equalization of those backed by weak lobby groups. Hence, it is optimal to rely only on tax-base equalization if the special interest groups are similar in terms of lobbying power, whereas a mixed system is optimal if they are highly heterogeneous. Tax competition reinforces the role of tax-base, while tax exporting that of tax-revenue, fiscal equalization.

We examine the tax assignment problem in a federation with two layers of government sharing an elastic tax base, in which Leviathan policy makers levy an excise tax in an imperfectly competitive market and producers lobby for tax rate cuts. If the lobby of producers is very influential on policy makers, we find that taxation by both layers of government might be optimal, provided that the market of the taxed good is highly concentrated; otherwise, it is optimal to assign the power to tax only to one level of government. Taxation by both layers of government is not optimal either when the influence of the lobby is weak, whatever the degree of market power. We also examine a richer set of tax setting outcomes, by considering the possibility that state policy makers have heterogeneous tax policy objectives.

The abolition of the municipal property tax on owner-occupied dwellings accomplished in Italy in 2008 offers a quasi-natural experiment that allows for the identification of the presence of political budget cycles - the incentives for municipalities close to elections to manipulate policy outcome decisions. Our empirical analysis shows that the reform impacted on municipalities that in 2008 were in their preelectoral year, by expanding the size of their budget in the form of an increase of current expenditure and fees and charges, but this did not occurred in municipalities that experienced their pre-electoral year before 2008.

Abstract
The Italian legislation provides a two-term limits for mayors, but it allows term-limited mayors to pass on the torch to one of their deputies as candidates for mayorship. We exploit this feature of the electoral system to design a novel identification strategy for separating the effects of 'accountability' (the difference in performance between two politicians facing different incentives in terms of re-elections) and 'competence' (the difference in performance between two politicians with different experience in policy making). Using a panel of 1203 Italian municipalities, from 1998 to 2015, we find a significant role for competence but not for accountability in affecting municipal spending. Specifically, second-and-last-term mayors, and first-term mayors with previous experience as executive officers, spend less, on average, than inexperienced first-term mayors. We also discuss the policy implications of this finding.