Read my lips? Taxes and elections

Clemens Fuest, Klaus Gründler, Niklas Potrafke and Fabian Ruthardt

Journal of Public Economics, 2024, vol. 236, issue C

Abstract: Recent research has found distinct electoral cycles in public spending, but the evidence for cycles in taxation is scarce, reflecting a lack of cross-nationally comparable measures of tax reforms. We use qualitative data provided by the IMF (Amaglobeli et al., 2018) to compile comprehensive tax reform indicators that cover the entire tax system for 22 countries between 1960–2014, including reforms of tax rates and bases for six tax types. Relating tax reforms to the timing of elections, we find results that are consistent with politicians postponing tax reforms to periods after elections. The results are most pronounced for tax increases, are stronger for tax rates than bases, and are driven by particularly salient tax types (personal income taxes and the VAT).

Keywords: Tax reforms; Tax systems; Tax rates; Tax bases; Data set; Electoral cycles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 D72 H20 H25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272724000859
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Read My Lips? Taxes and Elections (2021)
Working Paper: Read My Lips? Taxes and Elections (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:236:y:2024:i:c:s0047272724000859

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2024.105149

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba

More articles in Journal of Public Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().