We survey the theoretical and empirical literature on local and international tax competition in Economics. Based on this survey, we discuss whether EU countries should harmonize tax policies to prevent a race to the bottom. Much of the evidence suggests that tax competition does not lead to...

In 2001, the state parliament of the German federal state of Hesse abolished a 5 percent legal electoral threshold for local elections. This reform had a stronger effect on municipalities with larger councils because implicit electoral thresholds decrease with council size. Exploiting...

Do established parties change political institutions to disadvantage smaller, non-mainstream parties if the latters' electoral prospects improve? We study this question with a natural experiment from the German federal State of Hesse. The experiment is the abolishment of an explicit electoral...

Do established parties change political institutions to disadvantage smaller, nonmainstream parties if the latters´ electoral prospects improve? We study this question with a natural experiment from the German federal state of Hesse. The experiment is the abolishment of an explicit electoral...

This paper studies the economic costs of conflicts at the country and ethnic group settlement level with light output data as measured by orbital satellites and conflict data spatially mapped to latitude and longitude coordinates. Using a worldwide dataset of 7,704 individual ethnic group...

We study the local favoritism of appointed German state ministers. Matching hand-collected data on ministers’ place of residence to a sample of more than 8,000 west German municipalities during the period 1994–2013, we find that the home municipality of a state minister experiences higher...

We study the local favoritism of appointed German state ministers. Matching hand-collected data on ministers’ place of residence to a sample of more than 8,000 west German municipalities during the period 1994–2013, we find that the home municipality of a state minister experiences higher...

We study the economic implications of regional favoritism, a form of distributive politics that redistributes resources geographically within countries. Using enterprise surveys from low- and middle-income countries, we document that firms located close to leaders' birthplaces grow substantially...

Do voters place their trust in tried and tested leaders when uncertainty is high or do they prefer a new slate of leaders who are arguably more competent? To study this question, we make use of hand-collected data on 402,385 candidates who competed in open-list local council elections...