Taxes in Cities

Marius Brülhart, Sam Bucovetsky and Kurt Schmidheiny

Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'économie from Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, Département d’économie

Abstract: Most cities enjoy some autonomy over how they tax their residents, and that autonomy is typically exercised by multiple municipal governments within a given city. In this chapter, we document patterns of city-level taxation across countries, and we review the literature on a number of salient features affecting local tax setting in an urban context. Urban local governments on average raise some ten percent of total tax revenue in OECD countries and around half that share in non-OECD countries. We show that most cities are highly fragmented: urban areas with more than 500,000 inhabitants are divided into 74 local jurisdictions on average. The vast majority of these cities are characterized by a central municipality that strongly dominates the remaining jurisdictions in terms of population. These empirical regularities imply that an analysis of urban taxation needs to take account of three particular features: interdependence among tax-setting authorities (horizontally and vertically), jurisdictional size asymmetries, and the potential for agglomeration economies. We survey the relevant theoretical and empirical literatures, focusing in particular on models of asymmetric tax competition, of taxation and income sorting and of taxation in the presence of agglomeration rents.

Keywords: cities; taxes; tax competition; fiscal federalism; agglomeration; sorting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H71 H73 R28 R51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 72 pp.
Date: 2014-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-geo, nep-pbe, nep-pub and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in G. Duranton, J. V. Henderson and W. Strange (eds.), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, Volume 5B, pp. 1123-1196

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http://www.hec.unil.ch/deep/textes/14.04.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Taxes in Cities (2015)
Working Paper: Taxes in Cities (2014)
Working Paper: Taxes in Cities (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lau:crdeep:14.04

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