 The Assignment and Division of the Tax Base in a System of Hierarchical GovernmentsWilliam Hoyt () No 5801, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Abstract: Vertical externalities, changes in one level of government’s policies that affect the budget of another level of government, may lead to non-optimal government policies. These externalities are associated with tax bases that are shared or “co-occupied” by two levels of government. Here I consider whether the co-occupancy of tax bases is desirable. I examine the optimal extent of the tax bases of a lower level of government (local) and a higher level (state). I find that it is optimal to have co-occupancy in the absence of other corrective policies if commodities in tax base are substitutes. Further, if the state government can differentially tax the co-occupied segment of the tax base and the segment it alone taxes it will obtain the (second-best) outcome obtained with other policy instruments such as intergovernmental grants. Finally, if there are horizontal externalities generated by cross-border shopping, there is still reason to co-occupy the tax base if commodities are substitutes. As well, local governments should have those commodities with the lowest cross-border shopping costs in their tax base. Keywords: fiscal competition; vertical externalities; tax base co-occupancy (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_5801 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC. |
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