Central to the debate over U.S. international tax reform is understanding how multinational tax avoidance behavior might respond to a reduction in taxes on repatriated foreign-source earnings. Beginning in early 2009, several attempts have been made to re-institute a temporary 85 percent...

Despite only modest supporting evidence, shocks to households' personal finances are commonly cited as one of the principal causes of homeowner defaults. In this paper, I investigate the extent to which different component sources of annual variation in property tax obligations influence the...

Despite an extensive literature on the normative implications of different international tax regimes and an empirical literature addressing individual specific predictions, there exists little evidence encompassing the broad range of effects of taxing corporations' foreign-source income on a...

We estimate geographic barriers to trade in nine service categories for Canada's provinces from 1997 to 2007 with novel high quality bilateral provincial trade data. The border directly reduces average provincial trade with the US relative to interprovincial trade to 2.4% of its borderless...

We extend the structural gravity model to identify external economies or diseconomies of scale elasticities of cross-border trade. We find statistically and quantitatively significant economies of scale in cross-border trade in 5/8ths of sector-direction cases for Canadian provinces while the...

This paper infers the terms of trade effects of the Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) of the 1990s. Using panel data methods to resolve two way causality between trade and FTAs, we estimate large FTA effects on bilateral trade volume in digit manufacturing goods from 1990-2002. We deduce the terms of...

Despite ample anecdotal evidence for intensive international integration, the gravity literature of international trade fails to deliver consistent empirical support for globalization and for diminishing effects of distance on bilateral trade. Capitalizing on the properties of the structural...

Using a novel common econometric specification, we examine the measurement of three important effects in international trade that historically have been addressed largely separately: the (partial) effects on trade of economic integration agreements, national borders, and bilateral distance....

Standard trade theory suggests that Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) could disrupt trade between members and non-members. However, the trade diversion effects of FTAs have not been thoroughly examined empirically. Using a novel empirical approach, we confirm that FTAs that entered into force...

We develop and apply a procedure to flexibly estimate intra-national border barriers and intra-regional trade costs. Bilateral border barriers very significantly depress Canadian inter-provincial trade for some pairs, though the overall effect is rather small. Bilateral distance imposes much...