This paper analyzes the welfare implications of a transfer mechanism in a fiscally decentralized economy where local governments select their tax collection effort to maximize their lifetime utility. We consider a transfer rule that both punishes for the lack of efficiency in tax-collection and...

The Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) made significant changes to corporate and personal federal income taxation, including limiting the SALT (state and local property, income and sales taxes) deductibility to $10,000. States with high SALT tend to vote Democratic. This paper estimates the...

In a Regression Kink (RK) design with a finite sample, a confounding smooth nonlinear relationship between an assignment variable and an outcome variable around a threshold can be spuriously picked up as a kink and result in a biased estimate. In order to investigate how well RK designs handle...

This paper first formulates a model of how the politicians in a local government collectively lobby to raise intergovernmental grants to their local government. The model identifies a relationship between council size and grants received. I then study this relationship empirically using the...

In this paper, we test one of the fundamental assumptions in the tax competition literature, namely, that a country's taxable income depends on the tax policies pursued in the domestic and in neighbouring countries. Based on a panel of annual data of 14 Western European countries spanning the...

While the literature on how intergovernmental grants affect the budget of receiving jurisdictions is numerous, the very few studies that explicitly deal with likely endogeneity problems focus on grants targeted towards specific sectors or to specific type of recipients. The results from these...

Every year over 20 states offer sales tax holidays (STHs) on specific items like clothes, shoes and other items to encourage consumption, effecting over 100 million consumers. We use a unique dataset of credit cards transaction to study the spending response to these holidays. Using a...

We identify exogenous variation in incumbent policymakers' re-election probabilities and explore empirically how this variation affects the incumbents' investment in physical capital. Our results indicate that a higher re-election probability leads to higher investments, particularly in the...

The Structural Vector Auto-regression (SVAR) approach to estimating fiscal multipliers, following the seminal paper by Blanchard and Perotti (2002), has been widely applied in the literature. In our pa-per we discuss the interpretation of these estimates and suggest that they are more useful for...

Daycares closed on March 16, 2020 in Turkey to prevent the spread of COVID-19. At the same time, the two most common nonparental childcare arrangements in Turkey-care of children by grandparents and nannies-became undesirable due to health concerns and in some cases also unfeasible due to the...