The inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) literature traditionally focuses on expenditure efficiency, often overlooking local state capacity and tax enforcement. This paper investigates whether pooling administrative functions through IMC reduces the municipal property tax gap in Italy. Using official tax gap estimates and an Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) approach to account for self-selection, we reveal significant regional heterogeneity. In the Center-South, where baseline administrative capacity is lower, active cooperation reduces the tax gap by approximately 6 percentage points, acting as a crucial catch-up mechanism. Conversely, the marginal effect in the more compliant North is statistically zero. A counterfactual simulation estimates that extending cooperation to untreated municipalities in the Center-South could recover up to 240 million EUR annually. These findings highlight the value of targeted incentives aimed at low-capacity jurisdictions, where the potential to strengthen enforcement and maximize revenue recovery is highest.

This study evaluates whether asymmetric fiscal decentralization improves local revenue management in Korea. Jeju Special Self-Governing Province gained enhanced authority over local taxation under the Jeju Special Act in 2006. Using panel data for Korea’s upper-tier local governments (1996–2023), we apply the synthetic control method to estimate causal effects on the local tax ratio, tax collection rate, and accumulated arrears-to-total revenue ratio. The local tax ratio falls in 2006–2012 but rises thereafter, increasing by about 4.6 percentage points on average in 2013–2023 and significant at the 10% level. In contrast, collection and arrears indicators show no statistically significant improvement. Revenue autonomy can raise own-source revenue capacity, but improvements in revenue administration appear to require complementary accountability mechanisms.

Governments channel substantial fiscal policy through tax expenditures rather than through visible public spending, despite the well-known inefficiencies of tax expenditures. We argue that the politically relevant margin is not aggregate fiscal cost, but fragmentation into numerous legally distinct provisions, which reduces salience and weakens budget scrutiny. We develop a political-economy model with a rent-seeking firm, a vote-maximising politician, and a Treasury with enforcement capacity, micro-founding structural opacity as a function of the number of provisions. The model predicts that stronger Treasury enforcement unambiguously reduces fragmentation, while its effect on aggregate revenue foregone is theoretically ambiguous. Using a cross-country panel dataset from the Global Tax Expenditures Database and an instrumental-variables strategy based on the cultural substitution between exclusive family ties and generalised trust, we find that higher social capital significantly reduces the number of provisions but has no systematic effect on aggregate revenue foregone.

Border taxes are a workhorse instrument of fiscal and trade policy, but their effectiveness hinges on compliance at the border. We study where responses to border tax rates concentrate across product–partner lanes, highlighting heterogeneity linked to enforcement information and valuation uncertainty. Using Japanese transaction-level customs microdata and mirror trade statistics, we created HS6 product–partner–year panels for 2014–2021. Our estimation results show that the average semi-elasticity of mirror gaps with respect to border tax rates is statistically insignificant. However, heterogeneous estimates are nearly zero where enforcement is supported by a rich information base (many declarants and dense transaction histories), sizable where information is scarce, and stronger where lagged unit-value dispersion is greater. These “where the effect lives” patterns survive conservative diagnostics separating incentive responses from measurement noise. The results suggest that, even in a high-capacity country, responses to border taxes are shaped by lane-level information and valuation uncertainty confronting enforcement.