Tax Reform Narratives in German Municipal Tax Decisions

德国市政税收决策中的税制改革叙述

• 批准号: 540712849
• 负责人: Dr. Zareh Asatryan
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Forschungsbereich Unternehmensbesteuerung und Öffentliche Finanzwirtschaft
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 资助国家: 德国
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/540712849?language=en
• 关键词: Tax; Reform; Narratives; German; Municipal

This project studies the economic effects and political drivers of tax reforms using new textual data on politicians' narratives over local tax reform debates. The setting is the sub-national level in Germany, a federal country where local governments have autonomy in fairly rich sets of tax and spending instruments, and where the institutions permit the systematic collection of narrative data on tax reforms based on the meeting minutes of local government councils. Unlike standard datasets, the new narrative data allow to cover not only reforms but also reform proposals that were considered but never adopted, and also to measure economic and political motives behind these reforms and reform proposals at a granular level. First, the data makes the identification of the causal impact of tax reforms on local economies possible, and doing so under different government spending scenarios. This is achieved by comparing municipalities with tax reforms to empirically observable counterfactual municipalities where similar tax reforms were proposed but which failed to pass with a small vote margin. Albeit the substantial attention of the literature on estimating credible tax multipliers, the task has not been an easy one given that tax reform decisions are endogenously nested in the economics as well as politics of societies in complicated ways. Second, the narrative data enables constructing peer-to-peer networks of competition among German municipalities as perceived by policymakers, and then studying the effects of taxes in an environment where strategic interactions in tax-setting across jurisdictions are potentially idiosyncratic. This contributes to a fairly large body of work on empirical tax competition by relaxing the almost-universal assumption that jurisdictions compete with each other in some generic form (usually parametrized through some distance and population weighted matrix). Third, in an attempt to contribute to the literature on the political economy of tax reforms, the project measures the motives stated by political parties behind local tax reform proposals. In particular, it identifies the equity and efficiency arguments behind reforms and studies how political competition shapes these motives and their tradeoffs. This helps to understand how politicians in democracies set equity goals, which is important because the political feasibility of tax reforms depends crucially on the equity implications of those reforms. Overall, the new data on tax reform narratives opens several key research frontiers in the large literature on local public economics. In particular, the research agenda contributes to a better understanding of the causal effects of taxes on economic activity, when strategic interactions in tax setting are present and are likely idiosyncratic, and when taxes are determined endogenously in a democratic process of political competition.

本项目利用新的文本数据，对政治家对地方税收改革辩论的叙述，研究税收改革的经济影响和政治驱动力。背景是德国的次国家一级，这是一个联邦国家，地方政府在相当丰富的税收和支出工具方面拥有自主权，而且这些机构允许根据地方政府委员会的会议记录系统收集有关税收改革的叙述性数据。与标准数据集不同的是，新的叙述性数据不仅可以涵盖改革，还可以涵盖被考虑但从未被采纳的改革提案，还可以衡量这些改革和改革提案背后的经济和政治动机。首先，这些数据使得确定税制改革对地方经济的因果影响成为可能，并且在不同的政府支出情景下这样做。这是通过比较市政与税收改革的经验观察反事实的城市，提出了类似的税收改革，但未能通过一个小的投票差额。尽管大量的文献关注估算可信的税收乘数，但这项任务并不容易，因为税收改革决策以复杂的方式内在地嵌入社会的经济和政治之中。第二，叙事数据使构建对等网络的竞争德国城市之间的政策制定者认为，然后研究税收的影响，在环境中的战略相互作用，在税收制定跨司法管辖区是潜在的特质。这有助于通过放松几乎普遍的假设，即司法管辖区以某种通用形式相互竞争（通常通过一些距离和人口加权矩阵进行参数化），对经验税收竞争进行相当大的工作。第三，本课题对地方税改革提案背后的政党动机进行了测量，试图对税制改革的政治经济学文献做出贡献。特别是，它确定了改革背后的公平和效率的论点，并研究了政治竞争如何塑造这些动机及其权衡。这有助于理解民主国家的政治家如何设定公平目标，这一点很重要，因为税收改革的政治可行性在很大程度上取决于这些改革的公平影响。总的来说，关于税收改革叙述的新数据在关于地方公共经济学的大量文献中开辟了几个关键的研究前沿。特别是，研究议程有助于更好地了解税收对经济活动的因果关系，当税收设置的战略互动是存在的，可能是特质，当税收是内生的政治竞争的民主进程。