Papers and studies

Do fiscal decisions of incumbent mayors affect their probability of being re-elected? Do they consider the fiscal decisions of the neighboring mayors when they face an election? And do these strategic interactions remain stable over time, or do voters become more/less alert of, and incumbent mayors more/less reactive to, the decisions taken in nearby jurisdictions in successive electoral rounds? Fabio Padovano and Ilaria Petrarca provide rigorous analysis of those questions, based on empirical data on Italian municipalities.

Fiscal strategic interaction is a recurrent topic of recent economic literature. This short paper describes a database created as an instrument to analyze such interactions between Italian municipalities in local tax rate setting. The focus is on ICI tax rate (ICI = Imposta Comunale sugli Immobili=Municipal Tax on Immobile Property) because its revenue accounts for the larger municipal own-source fiscal resource.

"An Economic Rationale for the Net Wealth Tax - Does It Exist?"- Jan Schnellenbach
"Taxonomy of Wealth Taxes" - Philipp Bagus
"Because that's where the money is!" - Daniel Pellerin
 

Public Spending and Growth by Patrick Minford and Jiang Wang
L’endettement de l’Etat: stratégie de croissance ou myopie insouciante ? - Pierre Garello, Vesselina Spassova (french and english versions available)

 

The model presented in the paper leads us to predict that the level of redistribution will be all the more important where the jurisdictions have been able to shelter themselves from tax competition and have suppress any possibility for an individual or a group of individuals to secede.