Vertical Versus Horizontal Tax Externalities: An Empirical TestMarius Brülhart and Mario Jametti () Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'Econométrie et d'Economie politique (DEEP) from Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, DEEP Abstract: We study taxation externalities in federations of benevolent governments. Where different hierarchical government levels tax the same base, one can observe two types of externalities: a horizontal externality, working among governments of the same level and leading to tax rates that are too low compared to the social optimum; and a vertical externality, working between different levels of government and leading to suboptimally high tax rates. Building on the model of Keen and Kotsogiannis (2002), we derive a discriminating hypothesis to distinguish vertical and horizontal tax externalities based on observable variables. This test is applied to a panel data set on local taxes in a sample of Swiss municipalities that feature direct-democratic fiscal decision making, so as to maximize the correspondence with the "benevolent" governments of the theory. We find that vertical externalities dominate - they are thus an observed empirical phenomenon as well as a notable extension to the theory of tax competition. Keywords: tax competition; horizontal externalities; vertical externalities; fiscal federalism; Swiss tax system (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'Econométrie et d'Economie politique (DEEP) from Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, DEEP |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
Econpapers is hosted by the
Swedish Business School at Örebro University.