TY - CEPII
A1 - Federico Belotti
A1 - Edoardo di Porto
A1 - Gianluca Santoni
TI - The effect of local taxes on firm performance: evidence from geo referenced data
IS - 2016-03
T3 - Working Papers
KW - local taxation
KW - endogeneity
KW - spatial differencing
KW - two-way clustering
N2 - This paper investigates the impact of business property taxation on firms' performance using a panel of italian manufacturing firms. To account for endogeneity in local taxation, we exploit a pairwise spatial differenced generalized method of moments estimator. As well as providing robust inference, we also improve on existing work by exploiting the exogenous variation in local taxes generated by the political alignment of each local government with the central one. We find that property taxation exerts a negative impact on firms' employment, capital and sales to such an extent as to significantly affect total factor productivity.
ER -