Chapter 1:
I analyze economies of scale for fire and police services by considering how per-household costs are affected by a municipality’s size. Using 2005-2008 municipal data for the Province of Ontario, I employ a partial-linear model to non-parametrically estimate per-household cost curves for each service. The results show that cost per household is a U-shaped function of municipal size for each service. For fire services, these costs are minimized at a population of about 20,000 residents, while for police services they are minimized at about 50,000 residents. Based on these results, implications are drawn for municipal amalgamation policy.
Chapter 2:
I review how the literature has continued to exclude the business property tax (BPT) from the marginal effective tax rate (METR) on capital investment for over 25 years. I recast the METR theory as it relates to the BPT and compute 2013 estimates of the METR for all 10 provinces in Canada with provincial BPTs included. Building on these estimates, I compute the METR inclusive of municipal BPTs for the largest municipality in each province. I find the BPT to be substantially damaging to municipal, provincial and international competitiveness. With the business property tax representing over 60% of the Canadian METR, among the various capital taxes it is by far the largest contributor to Canada’s investment barrier.
Chapter 3:
I estimate the responsiveness of structure investment and the tax base to commercial property taxes, taking a new step toward resolving the “benefit view” vs. “capital tax view” debate within the literature. Using a first-difference structural model to analyze 2006-2013 municipal data for the Province of Ontario, I improve upon past studies and build onto the literature in a number of ways. I find that commercial structure investment and tax base are highly sensitive to the property tax with Ontario’s assessment-weighted average tax elasticity (and tax-base elasticity) ranging from -0.80 to -0.90 at 2011 taxation levels. The results support the capital tax view of the business property tax, building onto the growing consensus that business property taxes substantially impact investment in structures and the value of the tax base.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/65660 |
| Date | 18 July 2014 |
| Creators | Found, Adam |
| Contributors | Adonis, Yatchew |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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