We analyze the first data set on consistently defined functional urban areas in Europe and compare the European to the US urban system. City sizes in Europe do not follow a power law: the largest cities are “too small” to follow Zipf’s law.

Most cities enjoy some autonomy over how they tax their residents, and that autonomy is typically exercised by multiple municipal governments within a given city. In this chapter, we document patterns of city-level taxation across countries, and we review the literature on a number of salient...

Low corporate taxes can help attract new firms. This is the main mechanism underpinning the standard 'race-to-the-bottom' view of tax competition. A recent theoretical literature has qualified this view by formalizing the argument that agglomeration forces can reduce firms' sensitivity to tax...

Swiss metropolitan areas are comprised of a system of communities with considerable fiscal autonomy. This study investigates how the income tax differentials across communities in an urban area affect the households` location decisions. Data from the urban agglomeration of Basel for the year...

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...

"This paper examines the effects of information and communication technologies (ICT) on urban structure. Improvements in ICT may lead to changes in urban structure, for example, because they reduce the costs of communicating ideas from a distance. Hence, they may weaken local agglomeration...

This paper derives the closed form solution for multistep predictions of the conditional means and covariances for multivariate ARMA-GARCH models. These predictions are useful e.g. in mean-variance portfolio analysis when the rebalancing frequency is lower than the data frequency. In this...

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...