Inefficiencies from tax competition may result in governments seeking to limit fiscal competition via tax treaties, harmonization, minimum tax rates, or interjurisdictional cooperation. I propose a general model applicable to studying many types of taxing instruments, which allows for the...

How does gender composition influence individual and group behavior? To study this question empirically, we assembled a new, national sample of United States city council elections and digitized information from the minutes of over 40,000 city-council meetings. We find that replacing a male...

This paper develops a new approach to detecting electoral fraud. Our context involves repeaters, individuals voting in multiple states in the U.S. during 19th Century Congressional Elections. Given high travel times, and the associated difficulties of voting in multiple states on the same day,...

We examine a statewide program that identifies police departments with large racial disparities in traffic stops and works with identified departments to reduce disparities. The intervention caused large (23.56%) and persistent (at least 12 months) reductions in the number of minorities involved...

US universities have attracted hundreds of thousands of international students each year for the last decade. Some of these remain in the US after graduating and contribute to the high skilled labor supply in US labor markets. In this paper, we identify and estimate by how much one more...

We use an instrumental-variables estimator reliant on variation in congressional representation to analyze the effects of federal aid to state and local governments across all four major pieces of COVID-19 response legislation. Through September 2021, we estimate that the federal government...

What is a feasible and efficient policy to regulate air pollution from vehicles? A Pigouvian tax is technologically infeasible. Most countries instead rely on exhaust standards that limit air pollution emissions per mile for new vehicles. We assess the effectiveness and efficiency of these...

Using data on U.S. state and federal taxes and transfers over a quarter century, we estimate a regression model that yields the marginal effect of any shift of market income share from one quintile to another on the entire post tax, post-transfer income distribution. We identify exogenous income...

We study the relationship between housing supply and political partisanship in US cities using a new database of mayoral elections combined with local housing permits since 1980. Endogeneity of which party holds the mayoral office is addressed via a regression discontinuity design that relies on...

Education policy, while primarily the responsibility of the state governments, involves complicated decision making at the local, state, and federal levels. The federal involvement dramatically increased with the introduction of test-based accountability under the No Child Left Behind Act of...