Dube, Lester, and Reich (2010) argue that state-level minimum wage variation can be correlated with economic shocks, generating spurious evidence that higher minimum wages reduce employment. Using minimum wage variation within contiguous county pairs that share a state border, they find no...

When regions in close proximity have different tax rates, residents may engage in cross-border shopping and take advantage of tax differentials. The extent of this activity can be captured by the tax elasticity of border sales (TEBS). We collect 749 estimates of TEBS reported in 60 studies, and...

Benefits and taxes vary greatly across the European Union owing to incongruent welfare and taxation systems. This paper analyzes how welfare states achieve insurance and equity objectives for residents who work in other countries. The aim is to evaluate the impact of unemployment benefits and...

This paper studies the cross-border health and productivity effects of alcohol taxes. We estimate the effect of a large cut in the Finnish alcohol tax on mortality, alcohol related illnesses and work absenteeism in Sweden. This tax cut led to large differences in the prices of alcoholic...

We provide the first evidence on the causal effect of border enforcement on the full spatial distribution of Mexican immigrants to the United States. We address the endogeneity of border enforcement with an instrumental variables strategy based on administrative delays in budgetary allocations...

By exploiting a commuting policy that led to a sharp and unexpected inflow of Czech workers to areas along the German-Czech border, we examine the impact of an exogenous immigration-induced labor supply shock on local wages and employment of natives. On average, the supply shock leads to a...

We explore the effect of historical ethnic borders on contemporary conflict in Africa. We document that both the intensive and extensive margins of contemporary conflict are higher close to historical ethnic borders. Exploiting variations across artificial regions within an ethnicity's...

Scrutiny at the Canadian border to heighten security and simultaneously reduce type one (false positives) and type two (false negatives) errors utilize substantial resources as well as imposing opportunity costs on Canada in terms of time and trade diversion. One maligned strategy to minimize...

Does the organisation of healthcare systems affect health outcomes? To answer this question, we analysed the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic by focusing on mortality rate outcomes and exploited the heterogeneity of the healthcare organisational models among Italian regions, which makes Italy an...

Canonical models of migration feature border enforcement as a strategy to contain undocumented immigration by effectively exacting a mobility cost. This paper revisits the role of border enforcement policy in a task-based model of the labor market where employers simultaneously hire circular...