We study the labour market impact of the return of half a million Portuguese due to onset of the colonial war in 1974. Both the size and similarity with the native population (almost 80% were Portuguese-born) make this a unique shock. We use census data from 1960 and 1981 to document a decrease...

We study the labour market impact of a major shock of return migration, following the end of the Portuguese Colonial War in 1974. The retornados influx is unique because of its size (half a million people in a country of nine million), and similarity with the native population (almost 80% of the...

We estimate the causal impact of a 2018 zoning reform that banned new short-term rental registries in some parts of Lisbon. The short-term rental licence expires when the house is sold, hence the ban removes the option value of short-term renting a property. We rely on two administrative data...

We study a firm which serves two unequally-sized markets and must choose where to locate its first production plant, and whether to open a second plant to serve the other market through local sales rather than exports. An exporter pays taxes only to the country where it locates its single...

What type of employment exists in low-tax jurisdictions? How are employment and individual workers affected by reforms aimed at better aligning profits with real activities? Using a unique employer-employee dataset for Zona Franca da Madeira, a tax paradise on a Portuguese island, we show that...

This paper studies the relationship between fiscal decentralization and electoral accountability, by analyzing how decentralization impacts upon incentive and selection effects, and thus on voter welfare. The model abstracts from features such as public good spillovers or economies of scale, so...

The European economic integration leads to increasing mobility of factors, thereby threatening the stability of social transfer programs. This paper investigates the possibility to achieve by means of voluntary matching grants both the optimal allocation of factors and the optimal level of...

We study the impact of the Belgium lockdown on retail prices using a unique dataset tracking daily prices and promotions for various products in different stores and retail chains. Two distinctive features of our analysis are the ban on promotions during the first two weeks of the lockdown, and...

In this note we consider a society that partitions itself into disjoint jurisdictions, each choosing a location of its public project and a taxation scheme to finance it. The set of public project is multi-dimensional, and their costs could vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. We impose two...

Consider a population of citizens uniformly spread over the entire plane, that faces a problem of locating public facilities to be used by its members. The cost of every facility is financed by its users, who also face an idiosyncratic private access cost to the facility. We assume that the...