Why commuting matters: Horizontal and vertical tax externalities in the Belgian federation

Looking at the Belgian federation, where 10% of the working population commutes across the borders of three small regions, a case can be made for studying commuting flows in a federal constellation. In this paper, commuting is introduced to a federal setting where an ad valorem residence based tax on labour income is fully decentralised. This has lower-level (state) governments set inefficiently low taxes not to attract more workers, but to boost labour supply of own residents and hamper labour supplied by non-residents. When the labour tax base is co-occupied by the federal and state governme... Mehr ...