estimates of the returns to quality and coauthorship in economic academia salaries of academic economists are studied to determine if individuals receive differential returns to publishing articles of varying quality and to coauthored versus single authored articles estimates based on detailed data and a flexible nonlinear least squares procedure indicate that substantial returns to quality exist and that an individual s return from a coauthored paper with n authors is approximately 1 n times that of a single authored paper

who gains from capital market integration tax competition between unionized and non unionized countries the welfare effects of capital market integration are examined under a model of tax competition with two asymmetric countries the asymmetry is expressed through the labour market one country has a perfect labour market whereas the other country s labour market is unionized our results indicate that the welfare effects of capital market integration differ depending on whether governments are active or passive in attracting capital in the absence of active governments capital market integration benefits the country with a competitive labour market whereas it harms the unionized country capital market integration benefits both countries if governments are active and compete for mobile capital using taxes subsidies

evading the use tax on cross border sales abstract a use tax is similar to a sales tax except that it is imposed on purchases made from out of state firms historically the use tax has been widely evaded this paper uses a spatial model to analyze the welfare effects of such evasion the analysis shows that the ability of consumers to evade the use tax alters their behavior in a way that leads firms to charge lower prices this reduces the welfare loss created by the sellers market power and implies that evasion can increase welfare even when tax rates are adjusted to offset the effect of evasion on tax revenue

tax competition and tax co ordination under destination and origin principles a synthesis this paper proposes a general framework for analysing commodity tax competition under destination and origin principles based on three possible tax spillovers the consumer price spillover the producer price terms of trade spillover and rent spillovers a model is presented which can be extended to accommodate all three spillovers using this model many of the results in the existing literature can be derived compared and extended

asymmetric competition among nation states a differential game approach abstract this paper analyzes the impact of foreign investments on a small country s economy in the context of international competition to that end we model tax and public input competition within a differential game framework between two unequally sized countries the model accounts for the widely recognized characteristic that small states are more flexible in their political decision making than larger countries however we also acknowledge that small size is associated with limited institutional capacity in the provision of public services the model shows that the long term outcome of international competition crucially depends on the degree of capital mobility in particular we show that flexibility mitigates against but does not eliminate the likelihood of collapse in a small economy finally we note that the beneficial effect of flexibility in a small state increases with its inefficiency in providing public services and with the degree of international openness

heterogeneous human capital occupational choice and male female earnings differences human capital models have mainly focused on the rate of return to investment in a homogeneous stock of capital yet individuals have different initial attributes that determine comparative advantage in producing different types of human capital we find that mathematical ability is an important determinant of field choice for college students and that differences in earnings across fields are largely explained as a return to the use of scarce quantitative abilities in the production of each type of human capital the model successfully accounts for the observed male female differences in earnings and occupational choices of recent college graduates

the welfare analysis of product innovations with an application to computed tomography scanners the main goal of this paper is to put forward a methodology for the measurement of product innovations using a value metric that is equating the magnitude of innovations with the welfare gains they generate this research design is applied to the case of computed tomography scanners a revolutionary innovation in medical technology the econometric procedure centers on the estimation of a discrete choice model the nested multinominal logit which yields the parameters of a utility function defined over the changing quality dimensions of the innovative product the estimated flow of social gains from innovation is used to compute a social rate of return to r d to explore the interrelation between innovation and diffusion and to trace the time profile of benefits and costs the latter suggesting the possible occurrence of technological cycles

the spatial effects of wage or property tax differentials and local government choice between tax instruments abstract this paper considers the spatial effects on wages employment and business capital as functions of location of a localized differential in source based wage tax rates or business property tax rates between for example a central city and the surrounding suburbs a simple model is used in which business production uses only labor and capital inputs consumers have fixed residential locations but may commute to work wage and property tax differentials have effects that are similar in some ways but different in other ways if given a choice a local government would choose to set its business property tax rate equal to zero and use only a wage tax

risky recombinations institutional gatekeeping in the innovation process theories of innovation and technical change posit that inventions that combine knowledge across technology domains have greater impact than inventions drawn from a single domain the evidence for this claim comes mostly from research on patented inventions and ignores failed patent applications we draw on insights from research into institutional gatekeeping to theorize that to be granted patent applications that span technological domains must have higher quality than otherwise comparable narrower applications using data on failed and successful patent applications we estimate an integrated two stage model that accounts for this differential selection we find that more domain spanning patent applications are less likely to be approved and that controlling for this differential selection reduces the estimated effect of knowledge recombination on innovative impact by about one third by conceptualizing the patent approval process as a form of institutional gatekeeping this paper highlights the in

an empirical model of product design and pricing strategy abstract using the hedonic approach as a point of departure this paper develops an empirical model for analyzing product design and pricing strategies the model focuses on a multi product firm in a differentiated product market it identifies criteria for optimal design and pricing for the firm s several products given the firm s production costs the prices and designs of competing products and given consumer tastes the model is demonstrated with a real world application to the microcomputer industry

reliability and predictive validity of contingent values does the nature of the good matter abstract because the contingent valuation mechanism cvm elicits verbal reports of maximum willingness to pay and not actual willingness to pay analysts have expressed doubts about the reliability and validity of contingent values for commodities such as environmental amenities this skepticism is usually attributed to the amorphous nature of the commodity and to peoples lack of familiarity or experience however our comparison of two commodities which lie at polar extremes of the private good public good continuum suggests that the nature of the good may have little influence on the reliability and predictive validity of the cvm instead aspects of the cvm itself e g explicit payment obligation may be more important for high intention behavior consistency

applied welfare economics with discrete choice models economists have been paying increasing attention to the study of situations in which consumers face a discrete rather than a continuous set of choices such models are potentially very important in evaluating the impact of government programs upon consumer welfare but very little has been said in general regarding the tools of applied welfare economics indiscrete choice situations this paper shows how the conventional methods of applied welfare economics can be modified to handle such cases it focuses on the computation of the excess burden of taxation and the evaluation of quality change the results are applied to stochastic utility models including the popular cases of probit and logit analysis throughout the emphasis is on providing rigorous guidelines for carrying out applied work this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

patient mobility and health care quality when regions and patients differ in income we study the effects of cross border patient mobility on health care quality and welfare when income varies across and within regions we use a salop model with a high middle and low income region in each region a policy maker chooses health care quality to maximise the utility of its residents when health care costs are financed by general income taxation in equilibrium regions with higher income offer better quality which creates an incentive for patient mobility from lower to higher income regions assuming a prospective payment scheme based on drg pricing we find that lower non monetary administrative mobility costs have i no effect on quality or welfare in the high income region ii a negative effect on quality but a positive effect on welfare for the middle income region and iii ambiguous effects on quality and welfare for the low income region lower monetary mobility costs copayments might reduce welfare in both the middle and low income region thus health policies that stimulate cross border patient mobility can be counterproductive when regions differ in income

not by productivity alone how visibility and specialization contribute to academic earnings the popular adage publish or perish has long defined individual career strategies as well as scholarly investigations of earnings inequality in academe as researchers have relied heavily on rese

tax competition with heterogeneous capital mobility in this paper we look at corporate fiscal policies set by two competing regions in an environment where firms are heterogonous regarding to their mobility costs we show that if regions are allow to tax domestic and foreign capital at different rates they will offer a preferential treatment to foreign firms even if mobility costs are symmetrically distributed across regions preventing such type of preferential treatment raises revenues for both regions unless there exist a high density of firms with low moving costs because preferential tax treatment promotes firms movement for fiscal raisons such tax regime always generates more social loss due to unnecessary delocalization we also investigate the effect of heterogeneity among regions

open access journals and academics behavior the rising star of scholarly publishing is open access oa even some traditional journals now offer this option on author payment and many full freely accessible journals are now available to scholars providing relief to research institutions increasingly unable to afford the escalating subscription rates of serials however proper recognition of full oa journals by the community remains a major obstacle to overcome if they are to become a viable alternative for scholarly communication through a survey this work investigates economics scholars attitudes to oa and attempts to outline the state of practices and norms governing individuals publication choices jel l17 l86 o33

revenue sharing and information exchange under non discriminatory taxation the international exchange of tax information and its merits compared to withholding taxes is the central topic in current debates in international tax policy the purpose of this paper is to characterize and compare the tax regimes that emerge with and without information exchange under the assumption that countries are unable to differentiate between the taxes they apply to residents and non residents it focuses in particular on the role of asymmetries in country size capturing a key feature of tax havens and on the impact and potential desirability of schemes to share the revenue raised by withholding as under the new eu savings tax arrangements or more innovatively as a consequence of information exchange it is shown that irrespective of country size difference pareto efficiency requires that all revenue collected from nonresidents be transferred to the residence country which would require taking the eu practice even further from the norm but is currently the norm in relation to information exchange a withholding scheme with revenue fully reallocated in this way pareto dominates information sharing whatever the allocation under the latter comparing schemes in which there is no revenue sharing however shows that information exchange pareto dominates simple withholding

in a world without borders the impact of taxes on internet commerce the rapid rise in sales over the internet and the fact that most internet buyers pay no sales tax has ignited a considerable debate over taxes and the internet this paper uses new data on the purchase decisions of approximately 25 000 online users to examine the effect of local sales taxes on internet commerce the results suggest that controlling for observable characteristics people living in high sales taxes locations are significantly more likely to buy online the results are quite robust and cannot be explained by unobserved technological sophistication shopping costs or other alternative explanations the magnitudes in the paper suggest that applying existing sales taxes to internet commerce might reduce the number of online buyers by up to 24 percent

scholarships citations and salaries economic rewards in economics while substantial attention has been paid to the determinants of academics earnings 5 7 8 14 15 this literature has by implication suggested that the mere fact of having spent more time in the profession and the publication of more scholarly articles and books are the major determinants of salary differences our purpose here is to introduce a new determinant the quality of one s scholarly research measured by the frequency of references to that work as an additional objective measure of productivity we expect that this proxy for the extent of a scholar s influence on the work of other researchers is rewarded by the market in addition to giving a more complete picture of the determination of salaries in academic labor markets our approach should be useful in establishing a better framework for the evaluation of issues of discrimination in such markets than has been presented before 2 9

assessing the impact of jibs as an interdisciplinary journal a network approach in this editorial we assess the cross disciplinary connections of jibs by examining its citation network which spreads across no less than 36 disciplines or fields using a citation network of 166 citing and 645 cited journals we investigate jibs interdisciplinarity using the intermediation and integration approaches of network analysis our analyses of citation patterns for a 12 year time period 2001 2012 suggests that jibs is helping bridge disciplines that do not often otherwise talk to each other a task of critical importance for new knowledge creation we also find that jibs is enabling integration of knowledge from a diverse set of disciplines in comparison to other prominent leading management journals

a spatial model of tax competition with multiple tax instruments abstract this paper presents a model of tax competition with two local jurisdictions in each metropolitan area located along a line segment and many metropolitan areas in the world economy the residents in each local jurisdiction are allowed to commute at a constant cost per mile to work in the other jurisdiction if a lump sum tax can be used then other taxes are not used if source based wage and business capital taxes can both be used then only the former is used in this case or if only a business capital tax can be used the local public good is underprovided

on pareto improving commodity tax changes under fiscal competition this paper shows that when a noncooperative fiscal equilibrium of the mintz tulkens 1986 model of tax competition is inefficient pareto improving changes are positive for the taxes of both regions under concavity of the regions welfare functions it also identifies a class of such equilibria that are always efficient

welfare calculations in models of the demand for sanitation empirical and theoretical research on the demand for health inputs has been and still is extensive however it is not only important to analyse how household choice is affected by alternative and household specific attributes but it is equally important to analyse the welfare implications of for example a change in the price of different inputs policyrnakers and donor agencies involved in sanitation programmes will typically be interested in the welfare implications of different policy alternatives this paper analyses the welfare implications of a change in the price of certain sanitation related inputs in addition a comparison of the welfare estimates derived from the standard approach i e the conditional logit model and the more novel approach i e the random parameter mixed logit model is undertaken the findings suggest that model choice indeed has implications for the results since the welfare estimates from the two models differ quite remarkably less

local fiscal competition an application to sales taxation with multiple federations abstract local sales tax rates influence the location of retail activity this paper develops a theory and empirical identification strategy for studying sales tax competition with multiple federations as exemplified by multiple counties each containing several cities in addition to strategic interactions with nearby cities and a city s own county city tax rates are influenced by the tax rates of neighboring counties cities react heterogeneously to own county sales tax rates depending on distance to the county border using data on the driving time to county borders and a comprehensive cross section of local sales tax rates i exploit variation in proximity to county borders to identify vertical fiscal competition cities located near county borders react more intensely to their county s tax rate in comparison to towns at the interior an increase in the neighboring county tax rate raises city tax rates in nearby counties

market responses to publicly provided information the case of automative safety over the last 25 years the federal government has become increasingly involved in the provision of information on automobile quality and safety its release of national highway traffic safety administration data on occupant crash survivablity is a prominent example this paper examines the impact of the agency s crash test results on the sales growth of tested automobile lines finding no impact the crash data is then compared to privately collected insurance industry data on actual bodily injury claims by car line these data sets show little consistency based on these findings we conclude that consumers s apparent disregard of government crash test data may well be rational

compensating variation and hicksian choice probabilities in random utility models that are nonlinear in income in this paper we discuss hicksian demand and compensating variation in the context of discrete choice we first derive hicksian choice probabilities and the distribution of the random expenditure function in the general case when the utilities are nonlinear in income we subsequently derive exact and simple formulae for the expenditure and choice probabilities under price policy changes conditional on the initial utility level this is of particular interest for welfare measurement because it enables the researcher to compute the distribution of compensating variation in a simple way we also derive formulae for the joint distribution of expenditure the choice before and after a policy change has been introduced

price elasticity of gasoline smuggling a semi structural estimation approach abstract we estimate the price elasticity of the demand for gasoline smuggling in iran for this purpose we employ a detailed panel of monthly gasoline consumption data from 160 distribution hubs during the period 2005 2014 we apply two different approaches which are diff in diff and panel data estimations the results suggest that the foreign to home gasoline price ratios have a significant impact on the time varying elasticity of demand this finding supports the hypothesis that an increase in domestic gasoline prices will significantly reduce the demand for smuggling in addition as the distance of a region from its closest higher price neighboring country diminishes the price elasticity of demand for gasoline smuggling for that region declines as well finally we find that when the ratio of foreign to domestic prices is higher the gasoline demand sensitivities to price in neighboring countries go up our work offers new insights regarding the welfare impact of removing fuel subsidies and modifying fuel pricing policies

paying the professor sources of salary variation in academic labor markets using a set of 58 academic fields as distinct labor markets we examined the extent of wage variation within markets the degree to which wages vary is an indicator of market efficiency and of whether a market wage exists holding constant differences in human capital we found that the degree of wage variation in an academic labor market is negatively related to mobility within that market and positively related to the oversupply of labor we also found that as wage variation increases male female wage differentials also increase

the price of safety this article presents a simple economic model to assess consumers valuation of safety features in particular we model the benefit from safety as the reduction in the probability of death and the associated economic value of this reduction we then apply this theoretical model to investigate market valuation of antilock brakes and airbags via the specification and estimation of a hedonic price equation results indicate that consumers behave in a manner consistent with the economic model we develop

transfer pricing rules and corporate tax competition abstract a multinational parent sells a non marketed commodity to a foreign subsidiary that uses the product as an input to produce a product it then sells the subsidiary is controlled by a local managing partner whose compensation consists of a lump sum payment plus a share of the subsidiary s profit the parent chooses an optimal transfer price taking into account incentives for the subsidiary s managing partner and taxes home and host governments impose corporate income taxes on the parent and subsidiary s respective profits subject to a transfer pricing rule e g cost plus price method or comparable profit method a nash equilibrium is derived for effective tax rates chosen by home and host governments we then examine harmonization and suggest that tax rates would be reduced

state and local tax competition in a spatial model with sales taxes and residential property taxes abstract this paper presents a theoretical model with a uniformly populated line that is divided into local jurisdictions and or states if one level of government imposes sales and residential property taxes and if the spatial extent of each taxing jurisdiction is positive and finite then in nash equilibrium the sales tax rate is less than residential property tax rate housing consumption is suboptimal and the public good is underprovided in each jurisdiction if a very large state or country is divided into local jurisdictions and if both levels of government choose tax rates endogenously then under some assumptions there is an efficient outcome

on the interpretation of income variables in discrete choice models abstract in certain discrete choice models the unestimated function of income may be recovered however care must be taken lest inconsistency with choice theory result the correct interpretation of income in such models affects the computation of quantities such as income elasticities

asymmetric tax competition abstract the paper analyzes nash equilibrium when two jurisdictions set tax rates on a tax base which is mobile between them population differences imply tax differences the smaller jurisdiction levies a lower tax rate in equilibrium and its residents are better off than those in the larger jurisdiction the nash equilibrium is inefficient if the two jurisdictions merged the resulting allocation would be efficient however if differences in population are great enough residents of the small jurisdiction would be made worse off by such a merger

why do some occupations pay more than others social closure and earnings inequality in the united states1 this article elaborates and evaluates the neo weberian notion of social closure to investigate positional inequality in the united states it argues that social and legal barriers around occupations raise the rewards of their members by restricting the labor supply enhancing diffuse demand channeling demand or signaling a particular quality of service hypotheses derived from the closure perspective are evaluated using new data that map five institutionalized closure devices licensing educational credentialing voluntary certification association representation and unionization onto 488 occupations results from multilevel models demonstrate that closure practices particularly those that generate tangible restrictions on the labor supply shape the contemporary structure of occupational earnings returns to these strategies vary across occupations but are not tightly linked to the complexity of the occupation s knowledge base if suitably elaborated closure theory thus offers a promising complemen

spatial competition between jurisdictions which tax perfectly competitive retail or production centers abstract this paper examines the taxes that jurisdictions choose to impose on perfectly competitive retail centers or production centers within their boundaries retail centers are located on a line and jurisdictions are segments of the line a jurisdiction maximizes the sum of tax revenues and residents consumer surplus the tax chosen by a jurisdiction is a function of the spacing between retail centers the locations of interjurisdictional boundaries and the taxes imposed by neighboring jurisdictions an exporting jurisdiction chooses a positive tax an importing jurisdiction chooses a zero tax even if neighboring jurisdictions have taxes or subsidies if all jurisdictions with retail centers use endogenous fiscal policy then each imposes a positive or zero tax

commodity tax competition between member states of a federation equilibrium and efficiency we first describe regional market equilibria whereupon consumers of each region allocate their purchases of private goods between domestic and nondomestic ones according to the structure of relative prices taxes and transportation costs next regional optimal tax levels and public good quantities are derived the tax of the other region being held constant fiscal competition arises from the ability of one region in choosing its tax to alter the tax base of the other

flexible discrete choice demand models consistent with utility maximization an application to health care demand policies a considerable literature has developed to estimate the economic determinants of health care provider choice one important goal of this literature has been the estimation of price elasticities of health care demand particularly in rural areas of developing countries where debates continue regarding appropriate levels of user fees in government health facilities world bank accurate estimation of price elasticities is crucial to evaluating the trade offs between health promotion and revenue generation in rural areas where poorly funded government clinics are often consumers only accessible health care choices however the exact empirical implementation of demand estimation with discrete data has be

tax compliance and fiscal externalities evidence from u s diesel taxation abstract fiscal externalities across jurisdictions can arise from tax evasion and avoidance while the tax competition literature has generally focused on base shifting and the resulting positive fiscal externalities we show theoretically and empirically that negative fiscal externalities can dominate when the tax base is apportioned across jurisdictions this can lead to a negative relationship between jurisdiction size and the desired tax rate interstate truckers in the united states owe state diesel taxes based on diesel consumption which is apportioned based on the miles driven in each state we find that own state diesel sales fall when the diesel tax rates of other states rise suggesting that tax base evasion is the predominant source of externalities we then estimate a tax reaction specification finding that the own state tax rate is negatively correlated with the tax rates set in other states and with state size both consistent with the sign of the estimated fiscal externality

a spatial tax harmonization model abstract policies to harmonize value added tax rates are controversial in the european union this paper formulates a multi country model over a one dimensional space as a non cooperative nash game in which each country aims at maximizing its tax revenue subject to the constraint that its tax rate lies within a given common band then we examine the effects of changes in the common band on tax rates tax revenues and the number of cross border shoppers at nash equilibrium we also analyze the effects of geographical variation in country size and location

optimal fiscal regime in a spatial duopoly abstract we investigate a horizontally differentiated duopoly in which a public authority can either tax or subsidize firms in order to induce duopolists to choose the socially optimal locations the policy proposed here is such that welfare maximization is achieved by directly affecting firms location without explicitly modifying their price behavior

unit tax versus ad valorem tax a tax competition model with cross border shopping abstract within the framework of spatial tax competition with cross border shopping we examine the choice of tax method between ad valorem tax and unit specific tax this study shows that governments endogenously choose the ad valorem tax method not because of a classic welfare reason but because it is a good strategy to compete for mobile consumers another key finding is that while governments are committed to the ad valorem tax method the choice leads to inferior outcome tax cutting competition becomes more serious when countries adopt ad valorem tax and competition in ad valorem tax results in smaller tax revenue than competition in unit tax

crossing the border does commodity tax evasion reduce welfare and can enforcement improve it this paper compares discrete equilibria in which consumers do and do not evade commodity taxes by making cross border purchases when the government faces a revenue requirement the comparison shows that border crossing reduces welfare if resources wasted by evasion exceed the benefit of consumption changes where these changes reflect lower prices across the border and induced changes in domestic tax rates enforcement reduces welfare if administrative and uncertainty costs outweigh the benefits of consumption changes and the reduction in resource costs the analysis shows that the welfare effect of evasion depends on how well designed the tax system is and how effective enforcement resources are in deterring border crossing

interstate commodity tax differentials and the distribution of residents abstract this paper considers the manner in which an unequal distribution of consumers affects the commodity tax policies of neighboring jurisdictions the paper uses a spatial model in which the residents of two states are distributed non uniformly and employs a variety of assumptions about the behavior of governments and firms throughout the paper shows that at a nash equilibrium in tax levels the sparsely populated state imposes a lower tax than does its densely populated neighbor the paper also demonstrates how equilibrium state taxes differ depending on whether firms employ marginal cost or profit maximizing pricing

a three input model of the spatial effects of a central city wage tax abstract this paper considers the short run and long run spatial effects on wages employment and business capital as functions of location of a localized increase in wage tax rates the model is most applicable to a central city that has a higher wage tax rate than the surrounding suburbs the inclusion of land as a third input in production significantly reduces the long run effects of a central city wage tax on employment near the central city boundary as compared with a model in which labor and capital are the only two inputs the short run effects are significantly less than the long run effects

the spatial incidence of local retail taxation this paper examines the effects of local retail taxation in two simple models of spatial competition suppose that a suburb or central city imposes an excise tax or subsidy on a particular commodity such as gasoline liquor restaurant meals or groceries or imposes a general sales tax that affects many commodities simultaneously to what extent does this lead to higher prices within the jurisdiction and in neighboring jurisdictions section ii presents the basic model of spatial competition that forms a component of the fixed locations model of section iii and the entry model of section iv infinitely many stores are located along an infinite line and demand density is completely inelastic and uniform along the line the main endogenous variables of interest are the prices charged by the different stores throughout the paper a nash equilibrium in prices is assumed section iii presents the fixed locations model in which the tax is imposed after stores have already established themselves store locations are fixed due to location specific sunk costs if a suburb containing a single store imposes an excise tax on a commodity the store that is taxed and its first second and third nearest neighbors on each side increase their prices by 57 7 percent 15 5 percent 4 2 percent and 1 1 percent of the tax respectively this result is independent of the spacing of the stores and independent of whether or not they are evenly spaced if a suburb containing several stores imposes an excise tax the changes in price follow directly by adding the effects of taxes on several adjacent stores if a central city taxes all stores on the right half line the results are given by 12 the taxed and untaxed stores closest to the boundary

will destination based taxes be fully exploited when available an application to the u s commodity tax system abstract we develop a tax competition model that allows for the setting of both an origin based and a destination based commodity tax rate in the presence of avoidance and evasion in the presence of evasion jurisdictions will give cross border shoppers tax preferential treatment thus not fully exploiting the potential of destination based taxation moreover the divergence between origin based and destination based taxes is stronger when the incentives for consumers tax arbitrage opportunities increase the united states is one example of many such systems while sales taxes are due at the point of sale use taxes are due on goods purchased out of state we document that when able to set both rates a majority of jurisdictions levy destination based use taxes at a lower rate than origin based sales taxes in response to changes in state level policies that increase tax avoidance opportunities the results of the empirical model broadly confirm our theory

an optimal taxation approach to fiscal federalism in a federal system of government each unit of government decides independently how much of each type of public good to provide and what types of taxes and which tax rates to use in funding the public goods in this paper we explore what types of problems can arise from this decentralized form of decision making in particular we describe systematically the types of externalities that one unit of government can create for nonresidents through both its public goods decisions and its taxation decisions the paper also explores briefly what the central government might do to lessen the costs of decentralized decision making

prices taxes and automotive fuel cross border shopping abstract the aim of the present paper is to determine whether differences in automotive fuel prices among neighboring autonomous communities i e spanish political administrative regions affect the decisions taken by individuals regarding the region in which to purchase fuel in particular the intention is to discover if price increases in certain autonomous communities as a result of the application of the regional tranche of the hydrocarbon retail sales tax hrst has affected fuel purchases in neighboring communities in order to achieve the above mentioned objectives the monthly purchases of automotive diesel in aragon between january 2001 and march 2007 is estimated from the fuel price in aragon the relation between prices in each of the bordering communities and aragon weighted by density of traffic the number of vehicles registered in that community and three dummy variables representative of the implementation of the regional tranche of the hrst in madrid catalonia and valencia the paper finds empirical evidence to demonstrate a positive effect of the relative prices in the neighboring communities and vehicle registrations and also a negative effect of prices in aragon upon the acquisition of diesel in this region in the case of catalonia some evidence suggests that the price effect may have been strengthened following the introduction of the regional tranche of the hrst in august 2004

nonmonotonic status effects in new product adoption we investigate how the tendency to adopt a new product independently of social influence the recipients susceptibility to such influence and the sources strength of influence vary with social status leveraging insights from social psychology and sociology about middle status anxiety and conformity we propose that for products that potential adopters expect to boost their status both the tendency to adopt independently from others and the susceptibility to contagion is higher for middle status than for low and high status customers applying a nested case control design to the adoption of commercial kits used in genetic engineering we find evidence that status affects i how early or late one adopts regardless of social influence ii how susceptible one is to such influence operating through social ties and iii how influential one s own behavior is in triggering adoption by others the inverse u patterns in i and ii are consistent with middle status anxiety and conformity the findings have implications for how to use status to better understand adoption and contagion mechanisms and for targeting customers when launching new products

salary differentials by sex in the academic labor market this paper examines faculty time allocation decisions that are fundamental to the functioning of a university a random utility approach yields a grouped data multinomial logit model and predicts that time allocation decisions depend systematically on

cross border shopping from small to large countries abstract contrary to predictions of theoretical models there are many examples in the real world of cross border shopping from small to large countries we demonstrate that a sufficient wedge between marginal costs of public funds in small and large countries can explain this phenomenon

welfare effects of commodity tax harmonisation abstract the european commission is currently seeking a rapid accelaration of the process of commodity tax harmonisation within the european community substantial changes in domestic tax structures are envisaged yet the welfare theoretic basis of the policy has remained obscure this note goes some way towards suggesting a welfare argument for harmonisation as a collective response to tax induced trade distortions intentional or otherwise it is shown that a programme of multilateral domestic tax reform involving convergence towards an appropriately weighted average of pre existing tax structures a kind of harmonisation is potentially pareto improving

tax competition tax exporting and higher government choice of tax instruments for local governments abstract this paper presents a theoretical model with tax exporting due to external ownership of a fraction of the land in each local jurisdiction there are n local jurisdictions in a metropolitan area n 1 and many metropolitan areas in a world economy the paper examines the usage of business property taxes and source based wage taxes by local jurisdictions first in the presence of and then in the absence of residence based lump sum taxes and how this depends on and n the paper then examines the choice of a world national or state government as to whether to allow local metropolitan or sub metropolitan governments to use business property taxes wage taxes or both assuming that the local governments choose the actual tax rates

tacit collusion and international commodity taxation the paper employs a model of dynamic price competition to study how international commodity taxation affects the stability of collusive agreements when producers in an international duopoly agree not to export into each other s home market we consider both the choice of international tax principle and the harmonization of tax rates and differentiate between a setting where production costs differ between countries and a setting where exogenous tax rate differentials are the only asymmetry the conclusions derived from this model differ strongly from those obtained under the assumption of competitive product markets

jeux sans frontieres tax competition and tax coordination when countries differ in size closer international integration is putting increasing pressure on existing national tax structures this paper uses a simple two country model to address a range of consequent policy concerns focusing particularly on the role of country size differences in size exacerbate the inefficiency from noncooperative behavior harming both countries the smaller country loses from harmonization to any tax rate between those set in the noncooperative equilibrium but both countries gain from the imposition of a minimum tax anywhere in that range the fully optimal response to freer cross border trade however may be to do nothing jel h20 h77

on hotelling s competition with non uniform customer distributions abstract hotelling s competition in a two stage location price game is examined with increasing densities of consumers towards the centre it is shown that there is a range of rather even distributions for which firms locate at opposite ends of the market as the distribution becomes more concentrated duopolists will tend to move inside the market

cumulative gender disadvantage in contract employment women s wages do not grow with experience or tenure as much as men s do many accounts of this cumulative gender disadvantage attribute it to women s underinvestment in firm specific skills yet if that were true this disadvantage would not exist where firm specific skills are not rewarded by the labor market this article investigates this argument in the context of contract employment where demand for firm specificity is minimal contrary to expectations men still receive higher rewards than women over time drawing on quantitative evidence and qualitative fieldwork using job histories of high skill contractors affiliated with a staffing firm the author finds support for two sources of women s disadvantage lower rates of movement across clients on the supply side and unmeasured demand side factors by which similar levels of tenure and client transitions accrue lower rewards to women implications for research on gender stratification and career advancement in nonformalized labor markets are discussed

provision of a pure local public good in a spatial model with many jurisdictions abstract this paper examines the provision of a pure local public good in jurisdictions that are spaced evenly along an infinite line each jurisdiction either supplies the local public good or else its residents travel to another jurisdiction to consume the local public good the equilibrium spacing between jurisdictions which supply the local public good which can be uneven varying between a minimum spacing and a maximum spacing for given exogenous parameters can be greater than equal to or less than the socially optimal spacing

the impact of state taxes on self insurance abstract this paper assesses whether insurers state taxes reduce purchases of property casualty coverage tests are conducted using state aggregates of insurer level data from publicly available annual accounting reports for 1993 1995 a positive relation between self insurance and state taxes is detected consistent with consumers opting to self insure rather than bear the incidence of higher insurer taxes as expected tax effects vary with the elasticity of demand when demand is largely inelastic e g automobile liability coverage taxes do not affect self insurance