Revealed yardstick competition: Local government efficiency patterns in Norway

Revelli, Federico; Tovmo, Per

doi:10.1016/j.jue.2006.11.004

Cited by 98 publications

(87 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Geys (2006) provides evidence of spatial auto-correlation in Flemish local government efficiency ratings (see Revelli and Tovmo, 2007, for a similar finding using Norwegian data). 16 The results are qualitatively similar when employing distance-based matrices (details available upon request).…”

Section: Inter-jurisdictional Dependencementioning

confidence: 69%

Economic and Political Foundations of Local Tax Structures: An Empirical Investigation of the Tax Mix of Flemish Municipalities

Geys

Revelli

2011

Environ Plann C Gov Policy

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Building on the revenue structure theory developed by Hettich and Winer (1984, 1988, 1999, this paper is the first to investigate the economic and political determinants of local tax mix choices. We thereby use panel data on 289 municipalities in the Flemish region of Belgium (period 1995Belgium (period -2002, where local governments enjoy extensive fiscal autonomy and have a wide choice of available tax instruments. Estimating a system of five reduced-form equations for the five central revenue sources (income, property, business, user fees and other own revenues), our results show that economics plays a significantly more important role than politics in shaping the local tax mix. Moreover, supporting theoretical predictions about marginal cost equalization across available tax instruments, absolute reliance on each revenue source increases as the overall revenue requirement gets larger (a 'scaleeffect').

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Section: Inter-jurisdictional Dependencementioning

confidence: 69%

Economic and Political Foundations of Local Tax Structures: An Empirical Investigation of the Tax Mix of Flemish Municipalities

Geys

Revelli

2011

Environ Plann C Gov Policy

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“…This measure is the main indicator of productivity in Norwegian local governments, and has also been used by e.g. Bruns and Himmler (2011) and Revelli and Tovmo (2007), although in different settings than ours. The number of observations vary between 357 and 387 for different years, with a total number of observations equal to 2592.…”

Section: Efficiency and Hydropower Revenuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Local natural resource curse?

Borge

Parmer

Torvik

2015

Journal of Public Economics

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The large variation in revenues among Norwegian local governments can partly be explained by revenues collected from hydropower production. This revenue variation, combined with good data availability, can be used to extend the literature on the resource curse in two directions. First, to ensure that there is no problem of endogeneity in the analysis we obtain a purely exogenous measure of local revenue by instrumenting the variation in hydropower revenue, and thus total revenue, by topology, average precipitation and meters of river in steep terrain. Second, using data for revenue derived from hydropower production in Norwegian local governments we test the 'Rentier State' hypothesis; that revenue derived from natural resources should harm efficiency more than revenue derived from other sources such as taxation. Although we do find that higher local government revenue reduces the efficiency in production of public goods, we do not find that this effect is stronger for natural resource revenue than for other revenue.

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“…As the underlying competitive forces are hard to measure objectively, politicians' beliefs about what is real are especially likely to become of crucial importance. In line with this idea, Revelli and Tovmo (2007) illustrate that spatial policy dependence is particularly strong between jurisdictions where politicians believe that voters engage in benchmarking of their performance against other jurisdictions (for a related finding, see Brülhart and Parchet, 2010). This suggests that politicians' opinions about the importance of competitive pressures and the extent of tax base mobility have important implications for their policy decisions.…”

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confidence: 68%

Politicians' Opinions on Rivals in the Competition for Firms: An Empirical Analysis of Reference Points Near a Border

Geys

Osterloh

2011

SSRN Journal

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Die Dis cus si on Pape rs die nen einer mög lichst schnel len Ver brei tung von neue ren For schungs arbei ten des ZEW. Die Bei trä ge lie gen in allei ni ger Ver ant wor tung der Auto ren und stel len nicht not wen di ger wei se die Mei nung des ZEW dar.Dis cus si on Papers are inten ded to make results of ZEW research prompt ly avai la ble to other eco no mists in order to encou ra ge dis cus si on and sug gesti ons for revi si ons. The aut hors are sole ly respon si ble for the con tents which do not neces sa ri ly repre sent the opi ni on of the ZEW.Download this ZEW Discussion Paper from our ftp server:ftp://ftp.zew.de/pub/zew-docs/dp/dp11020.pdf Our empirical results are based on both OLS and natural spline regressions using survey data from over 700 German municipal leaders in the state of Baden-Württemberg. They Non-technical summaryshow that most politicians perceive other municipalities within their own state as the strongest competitive force. Yet, a crucial caveat to this finding concerns municipalities 'near' a border, in which politicians also perceive a strong competitive threat from across the border. This corroborates the idea that municipalities near a border have a broader reference group than is commonly assumed in the existing literature. Moreover, the importance of borders as a dividing line varies depending on the type of border. First, ceteris paribus, their effect is weaker (i.e., less constraining) for national than international borders: this means decision-makers in municipalities up to roughly 20km from the border take competition with jurisdictions beyond the border into consideration when a national, inter-regional border, is concerned, while the equivalent effect of an international border ceases after approximately 12.5km. Second, in our sample the French-German border is shown to have a stronger effect than the Swiss-German border. One tentative explanation is that politicians perceive the cultural dimension of these respective borders (i.e., language) to be more important than the institutional dimension (EU versus non-EU).Alternatively, it could reflect Switzerland's more aggressive corporate tax policy. Overall, our findings suggest that geographically close municipalities perceive each other as competitors for mobile capital regardless of the state or country where they are located.This indicates a need to refine the commonly used contiguity-and distance-based neighbourhood matrices by treating border-municipalities differently from in-land ones to avoid biased estimations of spatial interactions. This version: March 2011Abstract Studies of spatial policy interdependence in (local) public policies usually concentrate on the relations between jurisdictions within a single analysed region, and disregard possible extra-regional effects. This paper evaluates the validity of such restriction by studying German local politicians' assessments of their jurisdictions' main competitors in the struggle to attract firms. We find that location near a border significantly undermines poli...

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Revealed yardstick competition: Local government efficiency patterns in Norway

Cited by 98 publications

References 34 publications

Economic and Political Foundations of Local Tax Structures: An Empirical Investigation of the Tax Mix of Flemish Municipalities

Economic and Political Foundations of Local Tax Structures: An Empirical Investigation of the Tax Mix of Flemish Municipalities

Local natural resource curse?

Politicians' Opinions on Rivals in the Competition for Firms: An Empirical Analysis of Reference Points Near a Border

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