We design a spatial model featuring workers embodied with heterogeneous skills. In equilibrium, locations with improved market access become relatively more attractive to the high-skilled, high-income earners. We then empirically analyze the effects of the construction of the Swiss highway...

It is well understood that the two most popular empirical models of location choice - conditional logit and Poisson - return identical coefficient estimates when the regressors are not individual specific. We show that these two models differ starkly in terms of their implied predictions. The...

We study the effects of wealth taxation on reported wealth. Our analysis is based on data for Switzerland, which has the highest rate of annual wealth taxation in the developed world. While the wealth tax base is defined at the federal level, tax rates vary considerably across locations and over...

We study how reported wealth responds to changes in wealth tax rates. Exploiting rich intranational variation in Switzerland, the country with the highest revenue share of annual wealth taxation in the OECD, we find that a 1 percentage point drop in the wealth tax rate raises reported wealth by...

We study market rents in the neighborhood of asylum seeker hosting centers. Our empirical setting exploits the quasi-random opening of centers and spatial allocation of asylum seekers in Switzerland. Rents within 0.7km of an active center are found on average to be 3.8% lower than rents in the...

Fiscal federalism concerns the division of policy responsibilities among different levels of government. Many current economic and policy developments, such as globalization, environmental crises and rising inequality, may not appear to be favorable to fiscal federalism, yet countries are...