後藤 剛志

Abstract In this study, we estimate the tax-price elasticity of charitable giving and address the bias caused by the existence of unreported donations and self-selection regarding reporting on giving. To eliminate this bias, we propose a simple estimation method based on intention-to-treat analysis. Using our proposed method and the exogenous variation in tax incentives in the 2014 South Korean tax reform, we estimate the price elasticity to be −3.5 for the amount of total giving, which is more elastic than that in the standard results that do not account for unreported donations and self-selection. This result implies that the 2014 tax reform reduced the total amount of giving and that tax incentives should be expanded.

Mergers of local governments, commonly referred to as municipal mergers, have been widely implemented to internalize spillover effects. Many empirical studies point out that municipalities change the intertemporal budget allocation by increasing their debt issuance before mergers and they consider that this debt issuance is induced by the “fiscal common pool problem” because of pooled budgets after mergers. However, this phenomenon has yet to be analyzed theoretically. Therefore, this paper examines the mechanism of increased debt issuance before municipal mergers. We compare the debt issuance in the merger case with the level in the socially optimal and nonmerger cases. We find that the amount of debt issuance is larger in the merger case than in both other cases. The difference vanishes when spillovers are perfect.