This paper contributes to the emerging literature on racial and ethnic tension by analyzing the relationship between local socio-economic conditions and the propensity for outsiders to have threatening racial encounters with insiders. We use unique data for a sample of active-duty Army personnel...

Poverty rates on Native American Indian reservations are triple the US average. Small business incubation programs, available elsewhere in the US, are sparse on the reservations. Small businesses are potent drivers of US economic growth. Some 25.5 million entrepreneurs generate more than 50% of...

We assess a prominent argument for local economic policies that favor locally-owned businesses - namely, that locally-owned firms are more likely to internalize the costs to the community of decisions to reduce employment and hence help to insulate cities from adverse economic shocks. We test...

During the 1930s the federal government embarked upon an ambitious series of grant programs designed to counteract the Great Depression. Public works and relief programs combated unemployment by hiring workers and building social overhead capital while the Agricultural Adjustment Administration...

We test the hypothesis that local government officials in jurisdictions that have higher local sales taxes are more likely to use fiscal zoning to attract retailing. We find that total retail employment is not significantly affected by local sales tax rates, but employment in big box and anchor...

There has been an increasing reliance on sales taxation in both the states and counties in the United States. In this paper, we are examining the relationship between state and local sales taxation and business activity in the U.S. by utilizing county-level data for the period 2002-2011. We have...

We investigate the relationship between income tax rate variation and internal migration for the unique case of Switzerland, whose system of determining tax rates primarily at the community level results in enough variation to permit analysis of their influence on migration. Specifically, using...

We study the fiscal and tax response to intergovernmental grants, exploiting quasi-experimental variation within Germany's fiscal equalization scheme triggered by Census revisions of official population counts. Municipal budgets do not adjust instantly. Instead, spending and investments adapt...

We analyze the welfare implications of property taxation. Using a sufficient statistics approach, we show that the tax incidence depends on how housing prices, labor and other types of incomes as well as public services respond to property tax changes. Empirically, we exploit the German...

Despite important policy implications associated with the allocation of education resources, evidence on the effectiveness of school inputs remains inconclusive. In part, this is due to endogenous allocation; families sort themselves non-randomly into school districts and school districts...