Incumbent behavior: vote seeking, tax setting and yardstick competition

This paper develops a model of the political economy of tax-setting in a multijurisdictional world, where voters' choices and incumbent behavior are determined simultaneously. Voters are assumed to make comparisons between jurisdictions to overcome political agency problems. This forces incumbents into a (yardstick)competition in which they care about what other incumbents are doing. We provide a theoretical framework and empirical evidence using U.S. state data from 1960 to 1988. The results are encouraging to the view that vote-seeking and tax-setting are tied together through the nexus of yardstick competition.