Consensus and dissent in the resolution of conflicts of competence by the Spanish Constitutional Court: the role of federalism and ideology

Given the lack of unambiguously constitutional foundations, Spain’s Constitutional Court (TC) has being playing a leading role in building the regulatory framework of the Autonomic State. This paper analyses whether this function is sufficient to explain the level of agreement among TC justices when adopting their resolutions, and in particular, on reaching unanimous rulings. If so, the legalist/federalist model would be a more adequate model to explain the behaviour of TC justices than the other models proposed in the literature on judicial behaviour: the attitudinal and the strategic models. A database has been constructed for this purpose with the 390 positive conflicts of competence between the central government and the autonomous communities resolved by the TC from 1981 to 2017, which have been used to estimate various explanatory models of unanimous rulings. The results obtained show the importance of the legalist/federalist model when attempting to explain unanimity in the Court’s pronouncements, but they also offer evidence that there are other factors that also influence the level of agreement among TC justices, remarkably the ideological ones

Housing bubbles and land planning corruption: evidence from Spain’s largest municipalities

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to quantify to what extent the housing bubble in the early-to-mid 2000s in Spain exacerbated land planning corruption among Spain’s largest municipalities. Design/methodology/approach: The authors exploit plausibly exogenous variation in housing prices induced by changes in local mortgage market conditions; namely, the rapid expansion of savings banks (Cajas de Ahorros). Accounting for electoral competition in the 2003–2007 and 2007–2009 electoral cycles among Spanish municipalities larger than 25, 000 inhabitants, the authors estimate a positive relationship between housing prices and land planning corruption in municipalities with variation in savings bank establishments using instrumental variables techniques. Findings: A 1% increase in housing prices leads to a 3.9% points increase in the probability of land planning corruption. Moreover, absolute majority governments (not needing other parties’ support) are more susceptible to the incidence of corruption than non-majority ones. Two policy implications to address corruption emerge: enhance electoral competition and increase scrutiny over land planning decisions in sparsely populated. Originality/value: First empirical evidence of a formal link between the 2000s housing bubble in Spain and land planning corruption

¿Puede el borrador mejorar el cumplimiento tributario? Los efectos del programa Renta Web desde una perspectiva de sociología tributaria

A partir de los datos contenidos en la oleada de 2016 del Barómetro Fiscal del Instituto de Estudios Fiscales, este trabajo explora si los datos fiscales que la Agencia Tributaria proporciona a los contribuyentes del IRPF influyen en la moral fiscal y en el modo en el que los contribuyentes cumplimentan su declaración. Mediante modelos probit contrastamos si los datos fiscales aumentan la moral fiscal. En segundo lugar, contrastamos si los datos fiscales sirven para disuadir la percepción de conductas fraudulentas. De acuerdo con nuestros resultados, es la relación entre modificar los datos fiscales y la probabilidad percibida de ser inspeccionado lo que influencia tanto la moral fiscal como las percepciones sobre la cumplimentación de la declaración. Varias recomendaciones de política económica se derivan de los resultados obtenidos. This paper explores the effects of pre-populated personal income tax returns on taxpayers' tax morale and tax filing behavior. The special questionnaire on Renta Web included in the 2016 wave of the Spanish Institute for Fiscal Studies Fiscal Barometer surveyed individual perceptions on pre-populating income tax returns. Using probit regression analysis, we examine whether pre-population affects tax morale. Secondly, we test whether pre-population influences perceptions of tax filing behavior. Our main results show that the relationship between making changes on the pre-filled tax form and the likelihood of being audited influences the tax morale of Spaniards, as well as their perceptions of tax filing behavior. And on their own, pre-population features do not have a clear impact on tax morale or tax filing behavior. The results may have several clear policy implications

Is the Spanish Constitutional Court an instrument of the central government against the Autonomous Communities?

This work applies various probit/logit models to a database constructed by the authors, consisting of rulings by the Spanish Constitutional Court (Tribunal Constitucional, TC) resolving positive conflicts of competence between the Central Government and the Autonomous Communities from 1981 to 2014. Our goal is to contrast empirically whether the decisions of the Court respond strictly to legal criteria (the legalist or formalist viewpoint) or if they are determined by political motivations, so that we can state that the TC constitutes an extension, in the jurisdictional milieu, of the central executive power (the realist viewpoint). According to the results of our estimations, we can state that the approach which appears to predominate in the behaviour of the TC is the legalistic one