A very prominent instrument of regional policy is to foster education and human capital for-mation in economically lagging regions. However, this type of regional policy might actually hurt instead of help the recipient areas. The reason is that individual geographical mobility increases with...

In order to guarantee a further successful functioning of the enlarged European Union a Federal European Constitution is proposed. Six basic elements of a future European federal constitution are developed: the European commission should be turned into an European government and the European...

The paper quantifies the impact of agglomeration economies on the clustering of German firms. Therefore, I use the 2006 Innobarometer survey, which focuses on cluster characteristics and activities of German firms, to empirically identify agglomeration economies derived from the New Economic...

The paper analyses empirically the determinants of firms´ localization in Poland. We use regional data of the sixteen Polish administrative regions over the period 2003 to 2010 to examine which role agglomeration forces and other factors played in explaining the choice to operate in a certain...

We survey the theoretical and empirical literature on local and international tax competition in Economics. Based on this survey, we discuss whether EU countries should harmonize tax policies to prevent a race to the bottom. Much of the evidence suggests that tax competition does not lead to...

In this paper, we model the tax setting game between two revenue maximizing countries which compete for the location of a single production plant owned by a multinational firm. We introduce the possibility that the multinational can shift a fraction of its profits out of the country where the...

The paper analyzes the effects of a regionally coordinated profit tax in a model with three active countries, one of which is not part of the union, and a globally mobile firm. We show that regional tax coordination can lead to two types of welfare gains. First, for investments that would take...

A theoretical analysis considers the impact of a typical system of redistributive "fiscal equalization" transfers on the taxing effort of local jurisdictions. More specifically, it shows that the marginal contribution rate, i.e. the rate at which an increase in the tax base is reducing those...