Tax Reform Narratives in German Municipal Tax Decisions

本项目研究税收改革的经济影响和政治驱动因素，使用新的文本数据来研究政治家在地方税收改革辩论中的叙述。研究背景是德国的次国家层面。德国是一个联邦制国家，地方政府在相当丰富的税收和支出工具方面拥有自主权，政府机构允许根据地方政府委员会的会议记录，系统地收集有关税收改革的叙述性数据。与标准数据集不同，新的叙事数据不仅可以涵盖改革，还可以涵盖考虑过但从未采用的改革建议，还可以在细粒度层面衡量这些改革和改革建议背后的经济和政治动机。首先，这些数据使得识别税收改革对地方经济的因果影响成为可能，并在不同的政府支出情景下进行。这是通过将进行税收改革的市政当局与经验观察到的反事实市政当局进行比较来实现的，这些市政当局提出了类似的税收改革，但未能以微弱的票数优势通过。尽管文献对估计可信的税收乘数给予了大量关注，但考虑到税收改革决策以复杂的方式内在地嵌套在社会的经济和政治中，这项任务并不容易。其次，叙事数据可以构建政策制定者认为的德国市政当局之间的点对点竞争网络，然后研究税收在跨司法管辖区税收设定的战略互动可能具有特质的环境中的影响。这有助于大量的实证税收竞争工作，因为它放松了几乎普遍的假设，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）。第三，为了对税收改革的政治经济学文献做出贡献，该项目衡量了地方税收改革提案背后的政党所陈述的动机。特别是，它确定了改革背后的公平和效率论点，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对公平的影响。总的来说，关于税收改革叙事的新数据在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理解税收对经济活动的因果影响，当税收设置中的战略相互作用存在并且可能是特殊的，以及税收是在政治竞争的民主进程中内生确定的。

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.