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Working Paper
State capital taxes and the location of investment: empirical lessons from theoretical models of tax competition
Applying insights from theoretical tax competition models, this study of manufacturing investment and taxes in U.S. states makes four contributions to the empirical tax competition literature. First, while the existing empirical literature has assumed exogenous tax rates, the theoretical model, which endogenizes state tax rate choices, demonstrates that tax rates and investment decisions are determined by the same set of jurisdiction characteristics. The endogeneity corrected estimates, which rely on instruments motivated by the theoretical model, suggest stronger responses to tax rates than ...
Working Paper
Spatial competition and cross-border shopping
This paper investigates competition between jurisdictions in the context of cross-border shopping for state lottery tickets. We first develop a simple theoretical model in which consumers choose between state lotteries and face a trade-off between travel costs and the price of a fair gamble, which is declining in the size of the jackpot and the odds of winning. Given this trade-off, the model predicts that per-resident sales should be more responsive to prices in small states with densely populated borders, relative to large states with sparsely populated borders. Our empirical analysis ...
Working Paper
The flypaper effect unstuck: evidence on endogenous grants from the Federal Highway Aid Program
Contrary to simple theoretical predictions, previous empirical research has found that state government public spending is increased far more, often dollar-for-dollar, by federal grant receipts than by equivalent increases in constituent private income. This anomaly has come to be known as the flypaper effect. First, a legislative bargaining model developed in this paper provides a critique of this empirical finding. The model demonstrates a positive correlation between constituent preferences for public goods and intergovernmental grant receipts, and this correlation has likely biased the ...