Does Flypaper Effect Exist? New Evidence from Turkish Municipalities

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the phenomenon of flypaper effect and its relation to the local tax effort, by using a new and detailed panel data set that consist of all province and district municipalities' fiscal data in Turkey between 1997 and 2005. We use fixed effects and dynamic panel data specific GMM estimators to obtain the results. We provide new evidence using an advanced technique which is firstly used to uncover flypaper effect in Turkey. According to our estimations, the flypaper effect does exist for the Turkish municipalities. This result is robust to various model specifications and econometric techniques. Turkish municipalities also experience substitution effect of unconditional grants on the revenue collection efforts.