The purpose of this study is to investigate whether and to what extent fiscal decentralization affects tax effort of local governments in China after the Tax Sharing System (TSS). This research provides different indexes of tax effort and fiscal decentralization in analysis. By using the panel data of 31 regions in China during the period of 1996–2006 and the two-way fixed-effect model, the empirical results show that fiscal decentralization has a significantly positive impact on tax effort of local governments. In addition, this positive influence of fiscal decentralization on tax effort increases over time. Finally, trade openness and industrialization level also will enhance the local government's tax effort.

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This paper investigates the relationship between tax price and charitable contributions using the censored quantile regression (QR) technique, which can provide a complete description of the whole distribution of giving, and data from US Internal Revenue Service individual tax returns. The findings of the present study are as follows. First, the price elasticities of charitable contributions are all negative and consistently decrease in absolute value along the quantiles. Second, donors at lower giving quantiles are price elastic but donors at higher quantiles are price inelastic. Third, the income elasticities are positive and increase along the quantiles. Lastly, the effects of wealth, age, marital status, and the number of dependents vary across quantiles. All the empirical results show that the censored QR offers better explanations on the relationship between tax incentives and charitable contributions.

Based on province-level data on China’s local institutional environment from 2008 to 2014, we explore the relationship between the local institutional environment and stock price crash risk. We find that a stronger local institutional environment curbs stock price crash risk. Furthermore, we explore the relationship between local institutional environment and stock price crash risk for state-owned versus privately owned enterprises. We find that a stronger local institutional environment is more likely to curb stock price crash risk in state-owned enterprises than in privately owned enterprises. Our results are robust to additional tests. These findings suggest that it is necessary to accelerate the progress of local marketization in China to ensure the development of the stock market and a strong economy.

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