In this paper, I estimate the effect of increasing labor mobility on personal income tax schedules. I combine rich data on effective personal income tax levels in a panel of OECD countries for the period 1986-2005 with a new Index of Potential Labor Mobility. This index allows to tackle issues...

We analyze whether social distress from income comparisons affects attitudes towards the integration of economies. Using Germany’s division as natural experiment, we find that East Germans’ feelings of relative deprivation with respect to better-off West Germans led to significantly more...

This paper documents the novel fact that Regional Trade Agreements (RTA) decrease bilateral trade imbalances as measured by conventional measure of the net export share in gross trade. While on average an RTA decreases bilateral trade imbalance by 7%, greater trade integration through a deeper...

This paper shows that a regional bias resulting from trade integration alters the transmission of a countryś monetary policy by shifting the burden of the exchange rate adjustment towards the less integrated trading partners. I first develop a simple model which illustrates how a concentration...

Although the Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model is not a new tool for analysing policy impacts, it has not gained a wide popularity in regional applications such as rural economies yet. This study demonstrates how a regional CGE model can be applied for analysing regional impacts of...

For the first time since the Second World War, the total number of refugees amounts to more than 50 million people. Only a minority of these refugees seek asylum, and even fewer resettle in developed countries. At the same time, politicians, the media, and the public are worried about a lack of...

German reunication was a positive market access shock for both East and West Germany. Regions that for 45 years had experienced a decline in population due to their loss in market access following the division of Germany of WWII were most strongly affected by this positive shock. We use an...