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Record W4413184867 · doi:10.1093/ajcl/avaf003

Federalism and Vertical Tax Competition

2025· article· en· W4413184867 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe American Journal of Comparative Law · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBusiness, Management and Accounting
TopicCorporate Taxation and Avoidance
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsFederalismTax competitionCompetition (biology)EconomicsTax reformPublic economicsAd valorem taxPolitical sciencePoliticsLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract The division of shared tax bases between national and sub-national governments is a perennial source of conflict in federal nations. This Article compares historical trajectories in the four oldest constitutional federations—Switzerland, the United States, Canada, and Australia—to identify the causes, mechanics, and implications of “vertical tax competition,” the competitive process in which governments at one level attempt to increase their revenue at the expense of governments at a higher or lower level. The Article’s animating observation is that vertical tax competition has a centralizing tendency: national governments are likely to outcompete sub-national governments for revenue over the long run. This competitive advantage has a number of attractive economic implications, but it creates an ongoing risk for subnational autonomy and, more generally, the “balance” within federalism. This Article identifies the causes of this national advantage; the conditions under which subnational governments can limit it; a variety of legal responses that can be used to prevent extreme outcomes; and the implications for the governance of federalism. It also shows how these competitive dynamics and legal responses can help explain surprising differences between federal nations, including the relative fiscal power of national and subnational governments.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.614
Threshold uncertainty score0.183

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.022
GPT teacher head0.272
Teacher spread0.251 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it