A note on unemployment and capital tax competition

Abstract

We introduce a labor market imperfection into the capital tax competition literature to study the equilibrium tax formulae and their efficiency in the presence of unemployment. Since we allow for labor market imperfection, the standard conclusions of the tax competition literature would be generalized in the case of non-full employment. Our first result shows that even when head taxes on immobile residents are available, the optimal capital tax rate for jurisdictional governments is not zero. Our second finding is that decentralized equilibrium might be characterized by the overprovision of local public goods when the labor market is imperfect.