This paper investigates the benefits of banks' direct investment in foreign subsidiaries and branches for non-financial multinationals. The paper builds on the literature on international banks which has primarily focused on the implications for host countries, rather than for its international...

We examine how the bidding environment may affect the outcome of tax competition between two countries (or two regions) in attracting a firm's foreign direct investment (FDI).We compare the equilibrium location choice and payoffs from an English auction, with both complete and incomplete...

We use the German Job Vacancy Survey to investigate whether firms are able to attract more suitable applicants by offering bargain wages rather than posting fixed wages. Contrary to the theoretical predictions provided by the literature, we find that the offer to bargain over pay decreases the...

We study political competition in an environment in which voters have private information about their preferences. Our framework covers models of income taxation, public-goods provision or publicly provided private goods. Politicians are vote-share-maximizers. They can propose any policy that is...

In a recent paper Konrad and Thum (2014) present a model that shows that unilateral pre-commitment reduces the likelihood of agreement in bilateral negotiations over the provision of a public good when parties have private information over their contribution costs. We test the model in a...

A tax buyout is a contract between tax authorities and a tax payer which reduces the marginal income tax rate in exchange for a lump-sum payment. While previous contributions have focussed on labour supply, we consider the interaction with tax evasion and show that a buyout can increase expected...

Empirical literature on moral hazard focuses exclusively on the direct impact of asymmetric information on market outcomes, thus ignoring possible repercussions. We present a field experiment in which we consider a phenomenon that we call second-degree moral hazard – the tendency of the supply...

In this article we study the corporate tax effects on credit market equilibria. In particular, we develop a model that accounts for five pieces of evidence: i) the existence of a tax incentive to borrow, ii) the negative relationship between leverage and profitability, iii) the existence of...

We study the efficiency of banking regulation under financial integration. Banks freely choose the jurisdiction where to locate their activities and have private information about their efficiency level. Regulators non-cooperatively offer any regulatory contract that satisfies information and...

This paper develops a theoretical explanation why it may be optimal for higher-level governments to pay categorical block grants or closed-ended matching grants to local governments. We consider a federation with two types of local governments which differ in the cost of providing public goods....