Public Provision and Local Income Tax Competition

We extend the literature on local income tax competition by allowing for inter-jurisdictional spillovers and imperfect rivalry in consumption of a publicly provided good. Comparing decentralized second-best results of a theoretical model with an efficient benchmark, we identify three inefficiencies: (1) imperfect redistribution; (2) inter-community free-riding; and (3) an inefficient allocation of the population. We quantify the relative size of these inefficiencies in a numerical implementation of the theoretical model, which reveals that free-riding rises unambiguously in the level of spillovers, whereas the welfare losses from (1) and (3) depend nonlinearly on the levels of spillovers and rivalry.