Suchergebnisse

Over the last six years, researchers collaborating through the SNF Sinergia Project have collected data on fiscal federalism in Switzerland over more than half a century. The analysis of these new data in a range of projects has generated new and robust evidence on fiscal interdependencies among local governments and on behavioral responses of households facing local differences. This article presents some of the data collected and reports on nine examples of associated research projects.

Swiss metropolitan areas are comprised of a multitude of municipalities with large differences in local income taxes, average local incomes & local housing prices. Municipalities with a large share of rich households exhibit systematically lower taxes, higher housing prices & a slightly better provision of public goods than poor municipalities. This article shows in two theoretical models how such a situation occurs in equilibrium. Households are assumed to move freely & municipalities finance the local public goods by taxing the income of their residents. Simulations of the calibrated models can well explain the observed income & tax differentials across municipalities in the Zurich metropolitan area. The study of moving households in the Basel metropolitan area shows that tax differentials across local jurisdictions are not just the consequence, but also the cause of differences in local average income. Tables, Figures, Appendixes, References. Adapted from the source document.

Standard tax competition models predict a 'race-to-the-bottom' of corporate tax rates when firms are mobile. Recent theoretical literature has qualified this view by offering a theoretical explanation why this extreme prediction need not occur: central regions with large clusters of economic activity are able to set positive tax rates without fearing to lose firms to peripheral regions as the firms would forego 'rents' from agglomeration economies. In this paper, we study whether local policy makers effectively tax such agglomeration rents. We test this with panel data from Swiss municipalities between 1985 and 2005. We find that large urban areas set indeed higher tax rates than small ones. This is consistent with the theoretical prediction. Within urban areas, however, municipal tax rates are unrelated to the size of economic activity in and around municipalities while they are positively related to the size of the political jurisdiction. We see this result as evidence that the standard tax competition model for asymmetric jurisdictions is at work in the competition of municipalities within an urban area. Both results are robust to controlling for reverse causality by using instrumental variables. Controlling for fixed effects in a 20 year panel is non-informative and neither supports nor contradicts these findings. As a robustness check we introduce an new measure of cluster intensity which considers the varying intensities in agglomeration economies across sectors.

Decentralized fiscal decision making is more likely to be optimal if regional tax bases are non-rival, in the sense that one region's gain is no other relevant region's loss. We develop a method for estimating the rivalness of tax bases using the underlying structures of the conditional logit, Poisson and nested logit models. We use this method to estimate the effect of state-level capital taxation on U.S. inward foreign direct investment. While the results are rather noisy, the assumption of perfect non-rivalenss can in some cases be rejected, but the assumption of perfect rivalness cannot. Competition over FDI across U.S. states may well be a zero-sum game.