Hi, I’m Stefan!

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the ifo Center for Public Economics and LMU Munich. I am also a faculty member at WU Vienna’s Institute for Economic and Social History and affiliated with 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. I study how tax systems and fiscal institutions shape the behavior of firms, individuals, and governments, in both contemporary and historical settings.

Research

Working Papers

Corporate Tax Adoptions and Firm Relocations

Earlier title: “Taxed Out? How Early 20th Century Regional Tax Adoptions Shaped Interstate Firm Relocations”

Latest Version Oxford CBT Working Paper Abstract

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 Abstract

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

The Marshall Plan in Austria

with Kirsten Wandschneider

Funded by the Anniversary Fund of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank

Fiscal Stabilization with a Shared Government

with Christian Gréus

Draft coming soon Abstract

Does fiscal decentralization constrain macroeconomic stabilization? We develop a formal framework in which decentralization has a fiscal-space-maximizing optimum. Exceeding this optimum generates a double bind: central discretionary capacity declines while subnational efforts fail to compensate due to worsening coordination failures. Using panel local projections for 37 countries from 1990 to 2021 and a novel composite measure integrating expenditure shares with institutional autonomy, we find strong empirical support for our theoretical predictions. Higher decentralization constrains central discretionary responses to output gaps, subnational governments actively counter national shocks. While this contradicts the notion of subnational passivity, their interventions fail to stabilize national output, with effectiveness turning negative at high decentralization levels. The key challenge is not decentralization per se but the coordination failures that prevent subnational initiatives from translating into effective national stabilization.

Blame Shifting

with Niklas Potrafke & Tuuli Tähtinen

Corporate Tax Compliance under Enforcement Misperception

with Philipp Heil & Pascal Zamorski

The Welfare Effects of Wasting Talents

with Ashim Dubey, Gabriele Gurrieri & Sebastian Schirner