Professional sports teams commonly reevaluate their location decisions based on the prospect of building new, more attractive, stadiums. Even though a large economic literature warns about the modest (and possibly negative) effects on the local economy of hosting a professional sports team, the economic effects of professional teams and stadiums remain blurry for the general public, and cities in the United States continue to compete to lure teams with generous public subsidies. This article integrates several contributions of the literature into one cohesive and simple framework based on cost–benefit analysis, and provides estimations of the average local economic effects of teams in the four biggest professional leagues in the United States. If professional sports games do not attract visitors from other cities, or if players and owners do not spend a significant share of their income in the area, hosting a team can negatively affect the local economy.

A growing strand of literature relates pro-market institutions to business and overall employment creation. However, the effects of pro-market institutions on industry-specific employment creation still need to be better understood. Employment creation in some industries may be more sensitive to pro-market institutions. Moreover, if these industries employ a large proportion of the population, the role of local-level institutions becomes more critical for boosting employment creation across industries. Therefore, we disentangle the effects of local-level pro-market institutions on employment creation across nine major industries by using 5-year balanced panel data of 374 US metropolitan areas from 1972 to 2017. Our fixed-effects results indicate that pro-market institutions boost employment creation only in the manufacturing, retail, and construction sectors. Furthermore, our findings reveal that local public policies can benefit or harm local employment creation, depending on the concentration of industries in the area.

The part of the UK fiscal framework which determines how UK government funding is allocated across the four home nations has undergone profound change since 2012, given tax and social security devolution. The UK government’s post-Brexit plans for regional development funding, state aid, regulation and trade negotiations have led to significant disagreements about the nature of the devolved fiscal and constitutional settlement. And the COVID-19 pandemic provided a major shock to a fiscal system with limited flexibility for the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish devolved governments. This paper reviews the changes and challenges faced during these reforms and policy shocks. We find that: tensions about reforms to funding arrangements reflect the inconsistency of principles guiding the reforms; that the UK government’s post-Brexit plans do reduce the policy autonomy of the devolved governments, but reflect powers central governments often have in even highly decentralised countries; and that temporary changes to rules and the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic prevented a subnational fiscal crisis, but that more systematic change may make the system more robust to future shocks. This suggests that a review of the principles underpinning the UK’s subnational fiscal and economic policies would be highly worthwhile.

The federal government and over thirty states nationwide offer a tax credit in lieu of certain expenditures incurred as part of historic rehabilitation projects. Several economic impact studies have shown the positive effect of the credit on job creation, property values, and environmental friendly behavior in Louisville, KY (Gilderbloom, Hanka & Ambrosius, 2009) and in the state of Maryland (Frizzell & Mitchell, 2002). Most of the studies of historic preservation credits are, however, nonempirical and evaluate only the economic impact of the credit. The societal benefit-cost analysis conducted in this manuscript is the first study of its kind of the Ohio Historic Preservation Tax Credit (OHPTC) program. In addition, this study provides an OHPTC fiscal impact analysis (benefit-cost analysis from the government perspective).

The data for the analysis come from the county auditors’ offices, and multiple proprietary sources, including administrative estimates provided by the agencies managing the OHPTC program, and online survey of the developers. The sensitivity analysis accounts for the differences in discount rates and other factors. The study finds that the overall societal benefits will outweigh overall societal costs by 2023. From the fiscal perspective, the program begins to pay for itself in 2025, but the overall program costs will remain higher than overall benefits during the considered study period (until 2030).

As a result of the two severe stock market declines since 2000, there has been a steady debate about the affordability of state and local public pension benefits. We measured the affordability of pension benefits in terms of governments’ ability to make the required contributions based on existing tax and revenue bases. We conducted a historical analysis of government pension contributions at national and state level over a 20-year period 1992–2011 and found that the real pension burdens have increased over this period. We also found substantial variation in pension burdens among the 50 states. The results of our empirical analysis showed that employee contribution share, investment return, size of the public workforce, and pension benefit level had significant effects on pension burdens. Based on these findings, we proposed several strategies for reducing pension burdens, including increasing employee pension contribution, reducing size of workforce, and improving pension investment performance.

Fiscal stress pressures state legislators to either raise taxes or cut spending, but public pensions provide a vehicle to postpone tax increases and maintain current spending. I estimate that states cut their pension contributions at seven times the rate of other spending in response to fiscal stress. The cumulative impact of state undercontributions due to fiscal stress explains about 4% of mid-2008 actuarial underfunding. States not paying actuarially required contributions for reasons other than fiscal stress explains an additional quarter of underfunding. As investment returns explain little underfunding, much underfunding appears due to insufficient employee and actuarially required government contributions to keep up with growing pension liabilities.

This article describes the centralised nature of the UK, briefly describes the changes now under way in Scotland and Wales and then analyses differences in output per head as between nations and regions. It then considers the scope for devolution, including fiscal devolution within England. The United Kingdom today is one of the most fiscally-centralised of all OECD countries, but there will soon be reform in Scotland and Wales, with significant devolution of tax-raising powers to Edinburgh and Cardiff. In England, there is currently no ‘state’ or ‘regional’ tier of government. There have been significant differences in GDP/GVA per head of the nations and regions of the UK for many decades. Efforts to ‘rebalance’ the GDP/GVA totals shown above have involved public expenditure and investment programmes over several decades. The results of the UK's centralised distribution of resources, if any, on changes in regional and sub-regional performance are little studied. A highly-centralised system of taxation and public expenditure is not, it would appear, a guarantee of territorial economic equalisation. In a potentially radical policy departure, George Osborne has moved further than any minister in recent times towards a form of city-regional devolution within England. In the first instance, any devolved power is likely to be over public expenditure, though in the longer term fiscal devolution may become possible. The move towards a quasi-federal UK is now well under way.

Ce papier examine l'externalité verticale provenant de l'imposition d'une même base par des gouvernements aux territoires gigognes, phénomène récurrent observé dans la plupart des organiations étatiques et ayant fait l'objet d'un éclairage moins soutenu que celui de concurrence fiscale horizontale. Le modèle étudie un système comportant plusieurs niveaux de dèci-deurs et utilise la théorie des multiprincipaux pour analyser l'optimalité du degré de taxe lorsque plusieurs autorités exercent leur pouvoir fiscal sur une même assiette imposable. Cette théorie permet en effet d'appréhender et de décrire les mécanismes de concurrence entre différents décideurs poursuivant des objectifs propres. Il ressort que le comportement non coopératif de collectivités appartenant à différents niveaux administratifs et partageant une même base fiscale conduit à une hausse du taux de taxation auquel cette base est soumise. Chacun néglige en effet la perte de recettes fiscales qu'il inflige aux autres niveaux de gouvernement etdéfinit donc une taxe supérieure à celle qui correspondrait au coût marginal social. Le taux final d'imposition excède celui qui résulterait de l'exercice par un seul décideur public de la politique fiscale à mettre en oeuvre. Il apparaît en outre que la prise en compte d'une asymétrie d'information exerce un effet dépressif sur le niveau global d'imposition en conauisant chaque échelon à accorder une rente aux firmes, et donc à modérer sa pression fiscale, afin qu'elles révèlent leur information privéeet que puissent être mises en oeuvre les politiques les plus proches d'un optimum social.

In Belgium, families with young dependents receive tax reliefs depending on the type of care used. In this paper we analyze the Federal government policy that allows families using formal childcare to deduct their expenses out of their taxable income. For families using parental and informal care, a tax credit is granted for each child under three years old. We find that tax deduction of childcare expenses is a progressive tax policy among the users of formal day care. On the contrary, when considering all families with young dependents the tax policies for childcare are regressive.

L'objectif de cet article est de tester économétriquement l'existence d'interactions spatiales entre les choix d'imposition des départements français de métropole. Pour cela, un modèle de choix fiscal avec autorégression spatiale est spécifié pour estimer la pente de la fonction de meilleure réponse qui relie le taux d'impôt d'un département aux taux votés par les départements voisins pour le même impôt. Nous montrons que pour l'année 1999, l'hypothèse d'interactions fiscales horizontales ne peut être rejetée pour trois des quatre impôts départementaux étudiés, notamment pour la taxe professionnelle qui pèse uniquement sur les entreprises. À l'inverse, la fixation du taux départemental de la taxe d'habitation, qui pèse uniquement sur les ménages, ne semble pas gouvernée par les décisions des départements concurrents. Ces résultats sont compatibles à la fois avec les modèles de concurrence fiscale à la Wildasin (1988) et ceux de concurrence par comparaison à la Besley et Case (1995a).

The creation of a tax system linking the interests of the crown as well as the elites constitutes one of the most important developments for the early modern State. It requires the setting up of a «fiscal constitution» in which all parties abide by certain rules, implicit or explicit, to ensure the correct functioning of the system. This article considers the profits arising from the surpluses that resulted from the collection of alcabalas by town councils on agreement of the Crown. This will be done by comparing the amount due to the crown in the encabezamiento with what was actually collected by the town of Madrid. So, it will be shown that the resulting surpluses were a constitutive part of this mutually beneficial system.

This paper studies the composition and administration of municipal finances in the Kingdom of Aragon during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Economic prosperity during the sixteenth century allowed town councils to carry out significant projects in order to transform the terms between man and landscape, to expand economic activities or to increase the public power. As a result of this administration, raising indebtedness during the seventeenth century caused the bankruptcy of town councils. Their financial difficulties were sharpened by the fiscal demands from the monarchy during the second quarter of this century and imposed to municipal authorities the increase of incomes. Final bankruptcy of town councils in Aragon will transfer the control of propios and communal lands to Juntas composed by creditors and an important representation of clergymen.