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Fiscal packages usually capitalise into house prices. Yet if enough land for construction is available, housing developers could supply new houses and capitalisation may disappear. This paper provides a theoretical model in which income taxes and public services capitalise at lower rates when housing supply elasticity increases. Using an empirical linear interaction model, we estimate the impact of available land for construction on capitalisation rates with a panel of Swiss communities. Results indicate that fiscal variables do not capitalise differently in communities where housing supply is constrained by land availability. Thus, land availability is a necessary but not sufficient condition for capitalisation to disappear.

Using data from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, we test two interesting results that emerge from the theoretical model presented in Shleifer and Vishny (1994) that studies bargaining between politicians and managers of state-owned firms. Shleifer and Vishny's model suggests that firms with more state ownership should tend to pay less in bribes but not have a different experience of costly obstacles imposed on them by politicians. In our full sample, the results suggest that a one percent increase in state ownership is associated with a $125 reduction in the total annual informal payment of the firm and with a 0.5% decrease in the probability that a firm will consider corruption to be an obstacle to their current operations. We refine these average relationships somewhat by splitting the sample by global region. Only in our Europe and Central Asia sample do we find strong evidence in support of the first result and in this sample we find a signifcant effect of state ownership on obstacles. In our Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and Caribbean samples we do not find a significant effect on either corruption outcome. JEL Classification: D73, G32, L32, L33, P31

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