This is the fi rst study to evaluate the effects on school spending of repeal of constitutional property tax levy limits. While several studies report that the imposition of tax limits constrains local government and school district spending, this study fails to reject the null hypotheses that tax limit repeal in New York State induced no signifi cant immediate or gradual impact on the average ...

Tax reform has been an integral part of the economic reforms of most countries that have undertaken structural adjustment programmes. Even in the developed countries, tax reforms have been a prominent feature during the 1980s. One of the important reasons impelling governments of the developing countries embarking on economic reform programmes to undertake tax reform has been the need to cut th...

The degree of liberalization in OECD electricity markets varies considerably across countries. Commonly explained by diverging economic performances, corruption levels or government ideologies, this paper suggest another potential reason for cross-national differences in market reforms: given the high financial dependence of regulatory actors on public funding both in the past and nowadays, we ...

The public debt stock in some economically developed countries continues to increase because of a lack of tax revenues and the concomitant burdens of social security. Many of those countries suffer from lower birth rates and consequently, have fewer children. Child allowances might be an effective way to increase fertility, leading to higher future tax revenues through an increase in the number...

Empirical evidence evaluating the e¢ciency of economic instruments is still rare, despite signi...cant theoretical advances over the last decades. The purpose of the paper is to evaluate one form of environmental taxation, the French tax on air pollution from 1990-99. While starting out in 1985 as a tax levied only on sulphur emissions, the tax base was subsequently extended to encompass also e...

Countries throughout Sub-Saharan Africa are exploring options to improve local property taxation. Using the case of Kenya, this article provides an analytical framework for designing an effective property tax reform strategy. The first section presents a general conceptual model of property tax revenues, identifying four critical ratios that ultimately determine the effectiveness of any propert...

The weak government argument claims that fractionalized governments (coalition or minority governments) have more difficulty increasing their tax revenues or decreasing their spending than majority governments. This implies that weaker governments are associated with higher government deficits. In this paper, we test the implication of a fractionalization effect within the optimum financing mod...

The hypotheses of non-addiction, myopia and rational addiction are tested using annual, quarterly and monthly data. Changes in the prices of Japanese cigarettes can be viewed as exogenous from the point of view of consumer behavior, because the Japanese government controls cigarette prices. The empirical results of this paper support the addiction hypothesis. The short-run and long-run price el...

This paper analyzes the interaction between corporate taxes and corporate governance. We show that the characteristics of a taxation system impact the size of private benefits managers are able to extract. A higher tax rate increases the amount of income a manager would divert, while stronger tax enforcement reduces it and, in so doing, can raise the stock market value of a company in spite of ...

The Government of Cuba established a tax regime for micro-enterprise as soon as it legalized the sector in 1993. It was designed to function in a difficult context in which a tax-paying culture did not exist, in which widespread non-compliance was feared, and in which some micro-entrepreneurs' incomes were high. The tax regime included up-front monthly lump-sum payments, a 10% maximum amount of...