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Hi, I’m Stefan!

I am a fourth year Ph.D. student at the University of Vienna, with a Master’s from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Currently, I am a visiting graduate researcher at UCLA. I am also an affiliate of the California Center for Population Research.

My research fields are applied econometrics and empirical macroeconomics with a focus on public finance and economic history. Specifically, I use empirical tools in historical and contemporary settings to investigate how fiscal decentralization directly and indirectly impacts economies and their population.

My doctoral advisors are Monika Merz and Kirsten Wandschneider.

I will be on the 2024/25 academic job market. Check out my CV here.

Research

Working Papers

  • “Taxed Out? How Early 20th Century Regional Tax Adoptions Shaped Interstate Firm Relocations” Job Market Paper | Latest Version |
    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” (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.

Work in Progress

  • “Discretionary Policy under Fiscal Decentralization” | Poster |

    This paper examines the impact of fiscal decentralization on discretionary fiscal policies, focusing on how central and subnational entities respond to negative output gap shocks and their effectiveness. Through a cross-country analysis from 1990 to 2021 across 37 countries, two key findings have been generated. First, countries with greater decentralization experience reduced fluctuations in discretionary expenditures, supporting the claim that highly decentralized nations impose budgetary constraints on central governments. Second, there is a correlation between decentralization and fluctuations in subnational discretionary spending, with increased autonomy leading to more spending changes. However, these increased expenditures have limited or even adverse effects on the output gap, possibly due to the lack of coordination among subnational governments. These findings provide empirical evidence of negative externalities associated with fiscal decentralization.

  • “Migrants of Influence: Skill Levels and the Effects on International Trade” (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.

  • “Decentralized Tax Cuts and the Labor Market” (with Fabian Prettenthaler)

  • “Foot Voting on Gendered Protective Labor Rights”

Technical Notes, Data and Policy Work

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

  • “Identifying Directional Challenges in Gravity Equations with Balanced Dyadic Panel 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

Education

  • PhD in Economics, University of Vienna | 2021 - 2025 (expected)
    • Visiting PhD Student, University of California, Los Angeles | Fall 2024

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

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

Academic Positions

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

  • Graduate Researcher and Lecturer, University of Vienna | 2021 - present

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

  • Research Assistant, Oesterreichische Nationalbank | 2017

Teaching