This paper studies corporate tax competition if it is costly to learn some of the elements that determine the effective tax burden. Search cost may, but need not, eliminate the tax competition pressure. The outcome depends on the boundaries of tax rate and tax base choices. Search cost can...

How do voters allocate costly attention to alternative political issues? And how does selective ignorance of voters interact with policy design by politicians? We address these questions by developing a model of electoral competition with rationally inattentive voters. Rational inattention...

In this paper, we explore the role of trade in differentiated final goods as well offshoring of tasks for inequality both within and between countries. We emphasize the distinction between managerial and production labor. Production labor is assumed to be a variable input composed of tradable...

We address the role of labor cost differentials for national tax policies. Using a simple theoretical framework with two countries competing for a mobile firm, we show that in a bidding race for FDI, it is optimal for governments to compensate firms for international labor cost differentials....

We study optimal nonlinear income taxation when earnings can differ because of both ability and luck, so the income tax has both a redistributive role and an insurance role. A substantial literature on optimal redistribution in the absence of uncertainty has evolved since Mirrlees' original...

This paper estimates the causal effect of the wage on the recruitment rate at the establishment level. During the 1990s, the wage setting for certified teachers in Norway was completely centralized, with a wage premium of about 10 percent at schools with severe recruitment problems in the past...