This paper examines the effect of taxation on foreign investment and on business location within the United States. The idea is to compare the inter-state distribution of investments from certain foreign countries (those with foreign tax credit systems) with the distribution of investments from...

We develop a tax competition framework in which some jurisdictions, called tax havens, are parasitic on the revenues of other countries. The havens use real resources to help companies camouflage their home-country tax avoidance, and countries use resources in an attempt to limit the transfer of...

This paper tests whether differences across states in pollution regulation affect the location of manufacturing activity in the U.S. Plant-level data from the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Research Database is used to identify new plant births in each state over the 1963-1987 period. This is...

The evidence presented in this paper supports the basic theoretical presumption that state and local governments cannot redistribute income. Since individuals can avoid unfavorable taxes by migrating to jurisdictions that offer more favorable tax conditions, a relatively unfavorable tax will...

This paper investigates the response of young people in the United States to state laws dictating the minimum age at which individuals could marry, with and without parental consent. We use variation across states and over time to document behavioral responses to laws governing the age of...

We study the organization of federations - or international unions - which decide together the provision of certain public goods. The benefit of centralization depends on the internalization of the spillovers, that of decentralization on the adaptability to local differences. We individuate as...

This paper investigates how state and local fiscal institutions affect the pattern of relative wages between state and local government employees and their private sector counterparts. It focuses on changes in relative wages during the 1979-1986 period. Empirical analysis of data from the...

The US federal system provides great potential for estimating the effects of policy on behavior. There are numerous empirical studies that exploit variation in policies over space and time. In pursuing this line of enquiry, the issue of policy endogeneity is central. If state policy making is...

We use new establishment-level data and geographic mapping methods to improve upon evaluations of the effectiveness of state enterprise zones, focusing on California's program. Because zone boundaries do not follow census tracts or zip codes, we created digitized maps of original zone boundaries...

Racial segregation is often blamed for some of the achievement gap between blacks and whites. We study the effects of school and neighborhood segregation on the relative SAT scores of black students across different metropolitan areas, using large microdata samples for the 1998-2001 test...