254 research outputs found
Decentralized Taxation and the Size of Government: Evidence from Swiss State and Local Governments
According to the Leviathan-Model, fiscal federalism is seen as a binding constraint on a revenue-maximizing government. The competitive pressure of fiscal federalism is supposed to reduce public sector size as compared to unitary states. However, empirical results concerning the Leviathan hypothesis are mixed. This study uses a state and local-level panel data set of Swiss cantons from 1980 to 1998 to empirically analyze the effect of different federalist institutions on the size and structure of government revenue. Because of the considerable tax autonomy of sub-national Swiss governments, it is possible to investigate different mechanisms by which fiscal federalism may influence government size. The results indicate that tax exporting has a revenue expanding effect whereas tax competition favors a smaller size of government. Fragmentation has essentially no effect on the size of government revenue for Swiss cantons. The overall effect of revenue decentralization leads to fewer tax revenue but higher user charges. Thus, revenue decentralization favors a smaller size of government revenue and shifts government revenue from taxes to user charges.federalism, government revenue, tax competition, tax exporting
Fiscal Federalism and Economic Performance: Evidence from Swiss Cantons
The advantages and disadvantages of fiscal federalism are widely discussed in economics and political science. While some authors argue that federalism favors individual initiatives and serves as a market preserving device, others emphasize the dangers arising from an increasing corruption and local capture due to decentralization. In this paper, we empirically study the impact of different instruments of fiscal federalism on economic performance measured by GDP per capita using panel data for the 26 Swiss cantons from 1980 to 1998. In our econometric production function approach, the impact of fiscal federalism, tax competition and grants on economic performance is analyzed by additionally using controls for physical and human capital investment as well as further controls and indicators of fiscal federalism. According to our results, the intensity of tax competition, which is measured by the difference between a cantons tax rate and the average of its neighborsâ tax rates, is at least not harmful for economic performance. Moreover, the fragmentation of cantons in communities does not affect real GDP per capita indicating that economies of scale do not necessarily provide a good argument for a merger of communities.Fiscal Federalism, Economic Performance, Tax Competition, Grants.
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On uniform decay of the entropy for reaction-diffusion systems : dedicated to the memory of Klaus KirchgÀssner
In this work we derive entropy decay estimates for a class of nonlinear
reaction-diffusion systems modeling reversible chemical reactions under the
assumption of detailed balance. In particular, we provide explicit bounds for
the exponential decay of the relative logarithmic entropy, being based
essentially on the application of the log-Sobolev inequality and a
convexification argument only, making it quite robust to model variations. An
important feature of our analysis is the interaction of the two different
dissipative mechanisms: pure diffusion, forcing the system asymptotically to
the homogeneous state, and pure reaction, forcing the solution to the
(possibly inhomogeneous) chemical equilibrium. Only the interaction of both
mechanisms provides the convergence to the homogeneous equilibrium. Moreover,
we introduce two generalizations of the main result: we allow for vanishing
diffusion constants in some chemical components, and we consider different
entropy functionals. We provide a few examples to highlight the usability of
our approach and shortly discuss possible further applications and open
question
Tackling the undeclared economy in the European Union: an evaluation of the tax morale approach
To evaluate a new approach towards tackling the undeclared economy which views participants as social actors rather than rational economic actors, this paper reports evidence from 27,563 face-to-face interviews conducted across the European Union during 2013. Multilevel logistic regression analysis reveals a strong association between participation in undeclared work and the level of tax morale. Finding that higher tax morale (and thus a lower propensity to engage in undeclared work) is strongly correlated with greater levels of state intervention but also with individual-level characteristics such as gender, age, education and employment status, the paper concludes not only by confirming a political economy approach and refuting modernization and neo-liberal explanations and remedies, but also by revealing for the first time the importance of solutions not so far considered, including improving educational attainment, older citizens mentoring for younger people, and improving womenâs participation in the labour force
Discrete Routh Reduction
This paper develops the theory of abelian Routh reduction for discrete
mechanical systems and applies it to the variational integration of mechanical
systems with abelian symmetry. The reduction of variational Runge-Kutta
discretizations is considered, as well as the extent to which symmetry
reduction and discretization commute. These reduced methods allow the direct
simulation of dynamical features such as relative equilibria and relative
periodic orbits that can be obscured or difficult to identify in the unreduced
dynamics. The methods are demonstrated for the dynamics of an Earth orbiting
satellite with a non-spherical correction, as well as the double
spherical pendulum. The problem is interesting because in the unreduced
picture, geometric phases inherent in the model and those due to numerical
discretization can be hard to distinguish, but this issue does not appear in
the reduced algorithm, where one can directly observe interesting dynamical
structures in the reduced phase space (the cotangent bundle of shape space), in
which the geometric phases have been removed. The main feature of the double
spherical pendulum example is that it has a nontrivial magnetic term in its
reduced symplectic form. Our method is still efficient as it can directly
handle the essential non-canonical nature of the symplectic structure. In
contrast, a traditional symplectic method for canonical systems could require
repeated coordinate changes if one is evoking Darboux' theorem to transform the
symplectic structure into canonical form, thereby incurring additional
computational cost. Our method allows one to design reduced symplectic
integrators in a natural way, despite the noncanonical nature of the symplectic
structure.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures, numerous minor improvements, references added,
fixed typo
Renormalizing Partial Differential Equations
In this review paper, we explain how to apply Renormalization Group ideas to
the analysis of the long-time asymptotics of solutions of partial differential
equations. We illustrate the method on several examples of nonlinear parabolic
equations. We discuss many applications, including the stability of profiles
and fronts in the Ginzburg-Landau equation, anomalous scaling laws in
reaction-diffusion equations, and the shape of a solution near a blow-up point.Comment: 34 pages, Latex; [email protected]; [email protected]
Debt, economic growth and interest rates: An empirical study of the Swiss case, presenting a new long-term dataset: 1894-2014
Abstract In this paper, relations between public debt, economic growth, and long-term interest rates in Switzerland from 1894 to 2014 are examined. For this purpose, an original long-term dataset on the general gross public debt in Switzerland, namely the aggregation of the Confederation gross debt, the cantonsâ gross debts, and the municipal gross debts, was reconstructed. Three different statistical approaches are performed to study relations between this aggregated debt, economic growth, and interest rates. The first consists of the study of correlations between GDP-weighted variables, the second is the study of the correlation between residuals of ARIMA time series models, and the last one studies vector autoregression (VAR) models, allowing us to test Granger causalities between variables. Every approach is performed on the whole time period but also on boom phases and recession phases independently. All the results suggest that the public debt during this period in Switzerland did not have a negative impact on economic growth and did not raise long-term interest rates
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