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Empirical Assessment of the Existence of Taxable Agglomeration Rents

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  • Souleymane COULIBALY

Abstract

The New Economic Geography literature claims that firms are ready to pay more tax in "big markets" because of agglomeration rents. Tax authorities can thus set higher tax rates in denser economic area, hence an opposite mechanism to the "race to the bottom" process described by the classical tax competition theory. The aim of this paper is to empirically assess the existence of such agglomeration rents. We use Swiss data on municipalities corporate income tax rates and firms location to test the tax gap between these municipalities and the most peripheral one using a theory-based relation. Our estimations indicate that municipalities with higher agglomeration rents (measured as the number of firms plus the "potential of neighboring firms") are setting higher corporate income tax rates, hence confirming the existence of taxable agglomeration rents.

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  • Souleymane COULIBALY, 2008. "Empirical Assessment of the Existence of Taxable Agglomeration Rents," Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'économie 08.01, Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, Département d’économie.
    • Handle: RePEc:lau:crdeep:08.01
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    Cited by:

    1. Karen Crabbé & Karolien De Bruyne, 2013. "Taxes, Agglomeration Rents and Location Decisions of Firms," De Economist, Springer, vol. 161(4), pages 421-446, December.
    2. Kato, Hayato, 2015. "The importance of government commitment in attracting firms: A dynamic analysis of tax competition in an agglomeration economy," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 57-78.
    3. Yu Chen & Zhigang Li & Zheng Liu, 2018. "Agglomeration and actual tax rates: firm-level evidence from China," Regional Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 52(1), pages 93-104, January.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    agglomeration rents; tax competition; potential of neighboring firms;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C4 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics
    • H2 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue
    • R12 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity; Interregional Trade (economic geography)

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