Tax competition and political agency problems
研究了政治家声誉关切如何影响政府间竞争下的税收政策，发现仁慈政治家为区别于利维坦型政客而推行过低税率（反税收民粹主义），并分析了其福利效应。
Abstract We study how politicians' reputation concerns affect taxation in the presence of intergovernmental competition. To this end, we construct a two‐country asymmetric tax competition model in which the residents in one of the two countries face a domestic political agency problem: the residents do not know whether the incumbent politician is benevolent or leviathan. To separate themselves from leviathan politicians and attract voters’ support, benevolent politicians argue for excessively low taxation, which can be regarded as anti‐taxation populism. This anti‐taxation populism exhibits the following two properties. First, the populist country's low production technology relative to the other country facilitates the emergence of anti‐taxation populism. Second, anti‐taxation populism can improve welfare in terms of either the populist country or the whole world, depending on the asymmetry of the production technology.