Sammendrag
The common view is that bigger jurisdictions set higher tax rates than smaller jurisdictions. Most tax competition models assume that the cost of tax arbitrage is uniformly distributed and the tax base is only mobile between two jurisdictions. We overturn this conventional result by relaxing these (unrealistic) assumptions, but still assuming that the only source of heterogeneity is due to population differences. Applied to a model of commodity taxes, we show that the more people are living near borders, the lower will be a jurisdiction's tax rate. Empirically, we exploit changes over time and space of the population of a jurisdiction. Increases in the number of people living near borders lowers tax rates, and after accounting for this, changes in total population have little effect on tax rates. Our application extends to capital tax competition or profit taxation when moving costs are not uniformly distributed across firms.
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