This paper studies the long-term effect of taxation on economic geography and development. We rely on a unique natural experiment in place during France’s ancien régime: the salt tax. Introduced in the late 13th century and abrogated by the French Revolution in 1789, the salt tax was not...

This paper proposes a novel approach to evaluate location decisions for public facilities. The approach addresses, not only the standard distance-minimizing problem, but also the endogenous location decisions of individuals. To do so, I develop a quantifiable general equilibrium model with...

The transfer elasticity of income tax rates is an important parameter in public finance. Given the significant fiscal autonomy of Swiss municipalities, Switzerland is an ideal setting for examining behavioral responses to tax policy. Using a regression kink design, we find robust causal evidence...

This paper investigates whether and how gentrification spreads along intercity transport connections. We consider a model with heterogeneous individuals populating a primary and a secondary city, with commuting within and between cities. By reducing the cost of intercity commuting, the HSR...

This paper studies the long-term effect of taxation on economic geography and development. We rely on a unique natural experiment in place during France's ancien régime: the salt tax. Introduced in the late 13th century and abrogated by the French Revolution in 1789, the salt tax was not...

We study the fiscal determinants of the French Revolution, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the salt tax - a large source of royal revenues and one of the most extractive forms of taxation of the Ancien Régime. Implementing a Regression Discontinuity design (RDD), we find that parts...

This paper investigates whether and how gentrification spreads along intercity transport connections. We consider a model with heterogeneous individuals populating a primary and a secondary city, with commuting within and between cities. By reducing the cost of intercity commuting, the HSR...

The transfer elasticity of income tax rates is an important parameter in public finance. Given the significant fiscal autonomy of Swiss municipalities, Switzerland is an ideal setting for examining behavioral responses to tax policy. Using a regression kink design, we find robust causal evidence...

In this paper, we study how local border reforms affect economic activity. To do so, we make use of large-scale municipal merger reforms in Germany to assess the effect of local border changes on the distribution of activity in space, an issue that has not been addressed in existing literature....

This paper studies the equilibrium effects of local fiscal autonomy accounting for benefits from self-determination. It proposes a quantifiable structural equilibrium framework in which imperfectly mobile heterogeneous households sort themselves across jurisdictions under endogenous public good...