This paper provides a theory of incorporation and taxation that emphasizes the role of the corporate legal form in facilitating access to external capital and the potential advantages of limited liability. Incorporation relaxes financing constraints and makes corporations larger than comparable...

This paper analyzes to which extent foreign plant ownership involves lower tax payments than domestic plant ownership. We assess hypotheses about the tax savings of endogenous foreign subsidiary ownership relative to domestic firms in a data-set of 507,542 foreign- and domestically-owned...

Recent work in international economics provides insights into the measurement of product variety change - i.e., the change at the extensive margin of trade - and its consequences for a country's welfare. In such work, the measurement of product variety change is typically taken as given. There...

According to theory, capacity equalization grants cause local governments to internalize the effects of their tax policies on revenues of neighboring jurisdictions and so raise equilibrium tax rates. This paper empirically analyzes the incentive effects of equalizing transfers on business tax...

This paper studies the role of profit taxation for an international firm's decision upon how to penetrate a foreign market - through exports or through foreign direct investment (FDI) and local supply. We show that with harmonized taxes the international firm may choose FDI even though this has...

This paper presents empirical evidence of a positive effect of council size on government spending using a data set of 2,056 municipalities in the German state of Bavaria over a period of 21 years. We apply a regression discontinuity design to avoid an endogeneity bias. In particular, we exploit...

This paper compares four different estimators with respect to their suitability for cross-section gravity model estimation. In many circumstances, a Hausman-Taylor approach can be recommended. This framework may provide consistent parameter estimates, when OLS or the traditional random-effects...

This paper provides theory and firm-level evidence on the incorporation decision of entrepreneurs in a model of corporate governance and taxation. The theory explains how the incorporation decision of entrepreneurs is driven by taxation (corporate and personal income taxes), corporate...

This paper prooses a generalized panel data model with random effects and first-order spatially autocorrelated residuals that encompasses two previously suggested specifications. The first one is described in Anselin's (1988) book and the second one by Kapoor, Kelejian, and Prucha (2007). Our...