Grants and Marginal Cost of Public Funding: Empirical Evidence for Local Governments in Brazil

Abstract This paper documents empirical evidence on price-effect caused by lumpsum grants for local governments in Brazil between 2006 to 2010. Dahlby (2011) demonstrates theoretically that lump-sum grants can reduce the cost of public goods provision (price-effect), in addition to the traditional income effect. Our contributions are threefold. First we estimated semielasticity of the effects of tax rate changes on tax base (−0.016). Second, we calculate the MCF of the local tax imposed on the supply of services (ISS) for Brazilian municipalities (average of 0.04). Finally, we estimate the priceeffect estimation for ISS tax. Our results suggests that for the entire sample, that an increase in R$ 1.00 in per capita unconditional transfers reduces the local price effect (MCF) around 0.07%, but this result is not consistently estimated across all subsamples.