Social interactions are considered pivotal to agglomeration economies. We explore a unique dataset on mobile phone calls to examine how distance and population density shape the structure of social interactions. Exploiting an exogenous change in travel times, we show that distance is highly...

We study the effects of improvements in market transparency on eBay on seller exit and continuing sellers' behavior. An improvement in market transparency by reducing strategic bias in buyer ratings led to a significant increase in buyer valuation especially of sellers rated poorly prior to the...

We study the effects of improvements in market transparency on eBay on seller exit and continuing sellers’ behavior. An improvement in market transparency by reducing strategic bias in buyer ratings led to a significant increase in buyer valuation especially of sellers rated poorly prior to...

It has been argued that guilt aversion (the aversion to violate others' expectations) and the compliance to descriptive social norms (the aversion to act differently than others in the same situation) are important drivers of human behavior. We show in a formal model that both motives are...

A large literature examines government fiscal interactions in federations. However, the empirical evidence is scattered and inconclusive, especially with respect to the size of interactions, as well as the institutional and economic determinants underpinning them. This paper uses meta-regression...

In this paper, we examine the effects of changes in property tax rates and school spending on residential and business property value growth in southeast Michigan. We use panel data for 152 communities in the five counties surrounding Detroit between the years 1983 and 2002, a period during...

Estonian municipalities should perform a broad range of functions, while their fiscal resources are often limited and large disparities in fiscal capacity prevail among them. Moreover, the power to regulate fiscal affairs is mostly in the hands of the central government. We discuss how a strict...

Asia, particularly its major economies has witnessed slower growth in recent years. To make Asia more economically sustainable and resilient against external shocks to recover from the falling growth, most regional economies need to rebalance their export-oriented (mostly to advanced economies)...

Most existing empirical evidence on the impact of profit taxation on multinational firm activity is based on cross-country data. One major drawback of such data is that countries differ not only with regard to taxes but along other dimensions which might be hard to capture by means of observable...

This paper studies a two-region model in which unemployment, education decisions and interregional migration are endogenous. The poorer region exhibits both lower wages and higher unemployment rates, and migrants to the richer region are disproportionately skilled. The brain drain from the poor...