The identification of strategic interactions among local governments is typically plagued by endogeneity problems. This paper proposes a quasi-experimental strategy to identify independent personal income tax setting by Swiss municipalities making use of the multi-tier federal system. State...

This paper contributes to the theoretical understanding of strategic interactions of governments on global factor markets. We analyze carbon taxes and subsidies and their impact on national welfare in a fiscal federalism setting with international markets for capital and fossil resources, and...

Many developing countries have introduced sector-specific taxes on the consumption of mobile services, which apply on top of general taxes, and therefore discourage the positive externalities that have been estimated to be associated with the use of mobile technology on workers' productivity and...

In this paper, commuting is introduced to a federal economy where benevolent lower-level (state) governments levy an ad valorem tax on labour income. This results in inefficiently low levels of taxation, even when households as a whole do not migrate. Indeed, rather than attracting more workers...

I study the effect of refugees' protection status on labor market outcomes focusing on a recent cohort of Syrian and Iraqi refugees entering Germany between 2013 and 2016. My empirical analysis exploits a sudden and unpredictable change in the assessment of the Federal Agency responsible for...

Looking at the Belgian federation, where 10% of the working population commutes across the borders of three small regions, a case can be made for studying commuting flows in a federal constellation. In this paper, commuting is introduced to a federal setting where an ad valorem residence based...

Three sources of tax interactions among local jurisdictions are usually considered in the literature: public expenditure spill-over, tax competition and yardstick competition. However, another source of interdependency has been suggested in recent years: the 'political trend'. According to this...