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Hi, I’m Stefan!

I am a Post-Doc at the ifo Center for Public Finance and Political Economy and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. I am also an affiliate of the California Center for Population Research and CESifo. I studied at the University of Vienna and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was a visiting graduate researcher at UCLA.

My research fields are public economics and economic history, with a special focus on federalist systems.

Check out my CV here!

Research

Working Papers

  • “Taxed Out? How Early 20th Century Regional Tax Adoptions Shaped Interstate Firm Relocations” | Latest Version | Oxford CBT Working Paper |
    Are firms relocating in response to the introduction of a corporate income tax? This paper explores the effects of corporate income tax adoptions on interstate firm relocations in the US during the early 20th century. The historical context allows for an investigation of unharmonized and sequential regional tax adoptions between 1910 and 1930, when 16 states introduced taxation on corporate income. Leveraging newly linked employer-level data, together with a structural gravity model, enables a quantification of firm relocation flows caused by tax adoptions. The partial equilibrium analysis reveals a significant increase in average interstate firm flows by 13.02% attributable to these tax adoptions, where disaggregation by sector demonstrates pronounced effects for manufacturing, mercantile, service, and utility businesses. These effects decrease in the distance to the state border. Counterfactuals show that firm outflow in early adopter states would have been significantly lower without the introduction of the income tax, while non-adopters would have observed slightly larger outflows.
  • “A Taxing Journey: Tax Adoptions and Interstate Migration in the Early 20th Century” (joint with Kirsten Wandschneider) | Latest Version | CEPR Discussion Paper |
    This paper examines the relationship between sequential income tax adoptions and interstate migration in US states between 1900 and 1930. Exploiting the sequential introduction of personal and corporate state income taxes, we analyze matched full-count US census data to explore the causal links between state income tax introductions and migration patterns. To guide our empirical approach, we develop a simple migration gravity model with multilateral resistance. Employing a three-way fixed effects Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood (FE-PPML) framework, we estimate the gravity equation, incorporating a tax introduction indicator. Our findings indicate that the implementation of personal state income taxes lead to an 8.7% increase in internal migration. The adoption of corporate state income taxes is associated with a larger overall rise in internal migration (11.3%) across the population. Our results are robust to other interstate migration trends and hold across different subgroups of the population. We conclude that income tax adoptions had substantial implications for interstate migration during this period, potentially operating through two distinct channels. First, the direct taxation of personal income influenced migration decisions. Second, the introduction of corporate income taxes prompted business relocation, which, in turn, affected migration.

Selected Work in Progress

  • “Discretionary Policy under Fiscal Decentralization” | Draft coming soon! | Poster |

    This paper examines how fiscal decentralization affects the implementation and effectiveness of discretionary fiscal policies across different levels of government. Using data from 37 OECD countries from 1990 to 2021, I estimate a system of local projections to analyze the relationship between fiscal federalism and macroeconomic stabilization policy where I introduce a new and comprehensive measure of fiscal decentralization that accounts for both quantitative subnational expenditure shares and qualitative institutional autonomy. To identify discretionary fiscal responses, I use cyclically adjusted primary budgets across different government levels. Impulse responses reveal that higher fiscal decentralization significantly constrains central governments’ discretionary spending responses to economic downturns. While subnational governments in decentralized systems show increased fiscal responses, these interventions have limited and sometimes adverse effects on closing the national output gap. This suggests that decentralization may impair macroeconomic stabilization, even when they possess both the resources and autonomy to implement discretionary policies.

  • “Migrants of Influence: Skill Levels and the Effects on International Trade” (joint with Ashim Dubey) | Latest Version |

    Migration helps to circumnavigate trade barriers, and hence multilateral resistance, by decreasing information asymmetry. Hereby, the skill level of migrants is of first order importance. We develop a tractable model of international trade adjusting for firm-level heterogeneity in worker’s skill level. This helps us to identify a gravity formulation which explicitly models high skilled in-migration as a reduction in iceberg costs. We then test this hypothesis by estimating the structural gravity equation directly with PPML with a full set of fixed effects, allowing to control for the universe of potential multilateral resistances. We find a significant effect of migration on trade flows. This effect is strictly increasing in the skill level. Therefore, providing empirical support to our theoretical conjecture.

  • “Post-War Foreign Assistance and Regional Stability” (joint with Kirsten Wandschneider)

  • “Hidden Military Financing” (joint with Niklas Potrafke & Tuuli Tähtinen)

Technical Notes, Data and Policy Work

  • “Digitization of US Establishment Level Data 1900 - 1924”

  • “Flow Direction of Gravity Equations with Balanced Data” | Note

  • “The Impact of Increased Unemployment Benefits During the COVID-19 Pandemic” (with Noah Williams, Junjie Guo, Arwa Alalwani, Zhi Jiang, Jiashun Pang and Linhua Zeng) | CROWE University of Wisconsin-Madison, April 2021

Short Bio

Academic Positions

  • Post-Doc, ifo Institute | 2025 - present

  • Junior Faculty (non-tenure track AP), Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich | 2025 - present

Affiliations

  • California Center for Population Research (UCLA) | 2024 - present

  • CESifo | 2025 - present

Previous Positions

  • Visiting Graduate Researcher, UCLA | 2024 - 2025

  • Research Assistant, University of Wisconsin-Madison | 2020 - 2021

  • Research Assistant, Oesterreichische Nationalbank | 2017

Education

  • PhD in Economics, University of Vienna | 2021 - 2025
    • Visiting UCLA | 2024 - 2025

  • MSc in Econometrics, University of Wisconsin-Madison | 2019 - 2021

  • BSc in Economics, University of Vienna | 2015 - 2018

Teaching

  • Fiscal Federalism (Undergrad) | LMU | 2026

  • UE Introductory Econometrics (Graduate) | University of Vienna | 2022 - 2025