We study behavioral responses to local income taxes exploiting a special tax regime which applies to foreign employees residing in Switzerland. The used institutional setting generates two thresholds through which locally heterogeneous taxation is assigned: An income threshold at 120,000 Swiss...

In fiscally centralised countries with a unique country-wide income tax schedule, it is straightforward to quantify the degree of progressivity. In fiscally decentralised countries with varying local tax schedules, however, this is not the case. In these countries, the effective tax...

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.

We investigate the role of complementarities in production and skill mobility across cities. We propose a general equilibrium model of location choice by heterogeneously skilled workers, and consider different degrees of complementarities between the skills of workers. The nature of the...

We discuss important features and pitfalls of panel-data event study designs. We derive the following main results: First, event study designs and distributed-lag models are numerically identical leading to the same parameter estimates after correct reparametrization. Second, binning of effect...

We discuss important features and pitfalls of panel-data event study designs. We derive the following main results: First, event study designs and distributed-lag models are numerically identical leading to the same parameter estimates after correct reparametrization. Second, binning of effect...

Over the last six years, researchers collaborating through the SNF Sinergia Project have collected data on fiscal federalism in Switzerland over more than half a century. The analysis of these new data in a range of projects has generated new and robust evidence on fiscal interdependencies among...

Two innovations in the last century have changed dramatically the cost of communicating and transmitting information: The first is the widespread adoption of telephony; the second is the internet. We study the implications of these changes in ICT for urban structure. We find robust evidence that...

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...