We analyze the impact of large firms on business tax rates using data from German mu-nicipalities in Hesse in 1998-2005. Results suggest that business tax rates decrease with tax-payers' concentration, indicating strong local lobbying power of large firms.

Fertility and the provision of long-term care are connected by an aspect that has not received attention so far: both are time consuming activities that can be produced within the household or bought at the market and are, thus, connected through the intertemporal budget constraint of the...

This paper studies the factors driving changes in judicial independence (JI) as incorporated in constitutions. Two indicators of constitutionally safeguarded JI are constructed. Variations in these indicators are identified based on changes in the constitutions of as many as 100 countries that...

This paper studies regional output asymmetries following U.S. federal tax shocks. We estimate a vector autoregressive model for each U.S. state, utilizing the exogenous tax shock series recently proposed by Romer and Romer (2010) and find considerable variations: estimated output multipliers lie...

The literature on the wage curve provides considerable evidence in favor of a negative relationship between unemployment and wages. It is thus often seen as a refutation of the Harris-Todaro model, who point to a positive relationship. This paper shows that both strands of literature are special...

This paper empirically studies the voting outcomes of Egypt's first parliamentary elections after the Arab Spring. In light of the strong Islamist success in the polls, we explore the main determinants of Islamist vs. secular voting. We identify three dimensions that affect voting outcomes at...

This paper presents evidence on biased voting by jurors from the Warsaw Pact countries who ranked high-level chess games. The roots of this bias are probably ideological, as there were no formal benefits for biased voting. Furthermore, this bias is observed only for jurors from Eastern...

Resource-rich countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have the highest youth unemployment rate in the world. While other parts of the world are experiencing an increasing trend in new firms' formation as a potential solution for their unemployment problem, the MENA region has the...

In this paper, we explore the interest rate setting behavior of newly appointed central bank governors. We use the Kuttner and Posen (2010) sample, which covers 15 OECD countries, and estimate an augmented Taylor (1993) rule for the period 1974-2008. We find, first, that newly appointed...

This paper studies the voluntary provision of public goods that is partially driven by a desire to offset for individual polluting activities. We first extend existing theory and show that offsets allow a reduction in effective environmental pollution levels while not necessarily extending the...