This thesis is a collection of four stand-alone essays on international competition for human capital, together with a general introduction and some concluding remarks. The first essay deals with decentralized public education and human capital mobility. The international mobility of...

A rather neglected issue in the tax competition literature is the dependence of equilibrium outcomes on the presence of firms and shoppers (two-sided markets). Making use of a model of vertical and horizontal differentiation, within which jurisdictions compete by providing public goods and...

Despite their worldwide adoption by policy makers as the Holy Grail for entrepreneurship and business development, the effectiveness of business incubation programs remain elusive, primarily plagued by untenable evaluation methods. This paper develops an in-depth analysis on those methodological...

Individual wages differ substantially across regions and cities within Germany. Based on this observation, the thesis aims to shed light on the causes and the underlying microeconomic mechanisms responsible for regional differences in labor productivity. It takes the notion of local human...

I examine a situation where a firm chooses to locate a new factory in one of several jurisdictions. The value of the factory may differ among jurisdictions and it depends on the private information held by each jurisdiction. Jurisdictions compete for the location of the new factory. This...

This dissertation investigates empirically the consequences of recent fiscal policy changes on China?s rural development. It uses a county-level dataset covering over 90 percent of rural counties and a period of 13 years since 1993, in which China started to experience a series of fiscal reforms...

We study a model of tax competition between two countries when both skilled and unskilled workers make their migration decisions simultaneously and wages are endogenously determined. If both factors of production are allowed to migrate freely and when the demand for skilled labor is not so...

According to the disciplining hypothesis, globalization restrains governments by inducing increased budgetary pressure. As a consequence, governments shift their expenditures in favour of transfers and subsidies and away from capital expenditures. This expenditure shift is potentially enhanced...