Competing for global capital or local voters? The politics of business location incentives
Date
2015-09
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Repository Usage Stats
views
downloads
Citation Stats
Abstract
© 2015, Springer Science+Business Media New York. The competition for global capital has led to interjurisdictional competition between countries, states and cities as to who can offer the most attractive incentives to firms. In this study, we examine the domestic politics of this competition by focusing on incentive use in the United States from 1999 to 2012. We define incentives as the targeted tax deductions or exemptions that are used to lure businesses into a locality. Drawing on data from municipal incentive programs, we examine how electoral competition shapes the use and oversight of targeted incentives. We find evidence that cities with elected mayors provide larger incentives than non-elected city managers by taking advantage of exogeneity in the assignment of city government institutions and a database of over 2000 investment incentives from 2010 to 2012. We also find that elected mayors enjoy more lax oversight of incentive projects than their appointed counterparts. Our results have important implications for the study of interjurisdictional competition and the role of electoral institutions in shaping economic policy.
Type
Department
Description
Provenance
Subjects
Citation
Permalink
Published Version (Please cite this version)
Publication Info
Jensen, NM, EJ Malesky and M Walsh (2015). Competing for global capital or local voters? The politics of business location incentives. Public Choice, 164(3-4). pp. 331–356. 10.1007/s11127-015-0281-8 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/17732.
This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
Collections
Scholars@Duke
Edmund Malesky
Malesky is a specialist on Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam. Currently, Malesky's research agenda is very much at the intersection of Comparative and International Political Economy, falling into three major categories: 1) Authoritarian political institutions and their consequences; 2) The political influence of foreign direct investment and multinational corporations; and 3) Political institutions, private business development, and formalization.
Unless otherwise indicated, scholarly articles published by Duke faculty members are made available here with a CC-BY-NC (Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial) license, as enabled by the Duke Open Access Policy. If you wish to use the materials in ways not already permitted under CC-BY-NC, please consult the copyright owner. Other materials are made available here through the author’s grant of a non-exclusive license to make their work openly accessible.