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Fiscal stress is a common condition in shrinking cities such as Detroit. Among the contributing factors, property tax delinquency is a significant consideration due to the unwillingness or inability to pay property taxes. The literature shows that improvement in the quality of public goods and services can increase tax compliance and strengthen the social contract between taxpayers and the local government. Nonetheless, this relationship is unclear in the context of low-income shrinking cities. This article estimates the effects of new publicly provided transportation infrastructure on property tax compliance in Detroit, Michigan. Specifically, we use the announcement of the Qline in Detroit. We compute the effects of the Qline announcement on tax delinquency behavior using a Spatial Difference-in-Difference approach. The results indicate that the announcement of the Qline had an economically and statistically significant impact on tax delinquency for properties within one mile of the nearest Qline station. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the issue of taxes and charges in road freight transport in the Slovak Republic and the selected European countries. The aim is to compare and evaluate the position of the Slovak carriers towards foreign ones when doing business in the common European market. The selected kinds of taxes and charges (or costs items) relate to different production factors of road transport undertakings (vehicles, drivers, road infrastructure). Also, the legislation on taxes and charges differs among individual countries and differences can be observed in the principles of taxation. The objective isto make a comprehensive objectified comparison when taking into account several selected taxes, charges and costs in road transport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper first briefly reviews the extent to which profit maximising transport firms with identical cost functions and producing identical transport services pass-on output taxes to transport users under perfect competition, under different forms of imperfect competition and when they act as monopolists. Then the analysis is extended to derive the pass-on rates and activity reductions caused by an output tax when firms care both about profit and consumer surplus, produce symmetrically differentiated services and compete simultaneously in quantities and fare and when they collude. The pass-on rates and activity reductions are highest under collusion and lowest under Cournot competition when they produce complementary services. When they produce substitute services, the result is ambiguous and the competitive situation that yields highest pass-on depends on the firms’ objective functions and how fiercely they compete. Two important counterintuitive results are that the more intensely the firms compete and the more weight they put on consumer surplus, the higher the pass-on rates are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We formulate a game-theoretic model of a concession agreement between a government and a private party, a concessionaire, who has to engage a set of service providers as part of the operating responsibilities. We use the model to examine the importance of a government''s tax policy to induce private investments in transportation infrastructure. Our analysis brings to fore insights that are useful in the design of partnership agreements, such as the importance of early and binding government commitments to ensure stable partnerships, and thus, successful projects. Our analysis shows that these strong commitments are even more critical in situations where the success of the partnership requires participation of additional, self-interested parties, such as specialized service providers. Finally, we consider variations of the model where government preferences are explicitly captured, and where the returns from the fixed cost portion of the concessionaire''s investment are exempt from taxes. We show that both variations can lead to outcomes where the concessionaire''s tax burden is shifted to the service providers. This flexibility can be critical in the design of partnership agreements for (high-risk or highly specialized transportation) projects where additional incentives may be needed to induce private party participation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]