The African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) was signed by 54 member states of the African Union and is the largest free trade area in the world. Among other things, dismantling tariffs will have effects on public revenues in member states; this will require a revenue transition from...

What is the effect of e-commerce on the geographic distribution of local sales tax revenues? Using COVID-19 as a shock to online shopping and hand-collected high-frequency data on local sales tax revenue, we document an important shift in the state and local public finance landscape. As...

Requiring firms, rather than individuals, to remit sales taxes improves tax compliance. In the U.S., this shift toward firm-based remittance rules for remote purchases occurred gradually after South Dakota v. Wayfair. Using comprehensive and high-frequency local sales tax revenue data, we show...

This paper investigates whether a nation's contingent value of hosting a mega-event depends on past experience with implied public goods benefits for its residents. Applying data from an ex-ante and ex-post query based on contingent valuation methods, we use the FIFA World Cup 2006 as a natural...

We show that professional soccer players exhibit reference-dependent behavior during matches. Controlling for the state of the match and for unobserved heterogeneity, we show on a minute-by-minute basis that a player breaches the rules of the game, measured by the referee's assignment of cards,...

Applying a framework of perfect competition under uncertainty, we contribute to the discussion of whether or not ad valorem taxes and specific taxes are equivalent. While this equivalence holds without price uncertainty, we show that ad valorem taxes and specific taxes are "almost never"...

Several African countries have to increase their tax revenues to finance human and economic development. General consumption taxes, such as VATs, are the preferred instrument for doing so, because they are less detrimental to growth than income taxes. To enable their use, VAT design has to be...

It is entirely appropriate that the study of public finance take seriously "behavioralʺ inconsistencies with traditional models of individual and collective decision-making. This raises the question of whether the state should play a role in protecting individuals from themselves, and whether...

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...

This paper studies the evasion of TV license fees in Austria. We exploit border differentials to identify the effect of fees on evasion. Comparing municipalities at the low- and high-fee side of state borders reveals that higher fees trigger significantly more evasion. The central estimate from...