The Political Costs of Taxation

Eva Davoine (), Joseph Enguehard () and Igor Kolesnikov ()
Additional contact information
Eva Davoine: UC Berkeley
Joseph Enguehard: ENS de Lyon & University of Bologna
Igor Kolesnikov: UC Berkeley

No 27, Working Papers from EU Tax Observatory

Abstract: We examine the political costs of taxation in early modern France. We focus on efforts to enforce the salt tax, the rate of which varied across regions. Using a spatial difference-in-discontinuities design, we compare municipalities just inside the high-tax region with those just outside, before and after a reform aimed at curbing illicit salt smuggling. We find that tax enforcement led to a twenty-fold increase in conflicts between taxpayers and the state in municipalities in the high-tax region. This effect persists until the French Revolution, supporting the view that enforcing the salt tax incurred significant political costs. Finally, we document that the likelihood of conflict increases with tax differences between neighboring regions, which we use to derive an upper bound on the political costs of increased tax enforcement in this historical period.

Keywords: Taxation; Protest; Conflict (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 H26 H39 K42 N43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 68 pages
Date: 2025-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.taxobservatory.eu//www-site/uploads/20 ... osts-of-Taxation.pdf Full working paper (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:dbp:wpaper:027

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from EU Tax Observatory Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Inga Chilashvili ().