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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” (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.

Work in Progress

  • “Discretionary Policy under Fiscal Decentralization” | Draft | Poster |

    This paper examines how fiscal decentralization affects the implementation and effectiveness of discretionary fiscal policies across different levels of government. Using a comprehensive dataset spanning 37 countries from 1990 to 2021, I develop a novel empirical framework to analyze the relationship between fiscal federalism and macroeconomic stabilization policy. I introduce a new combined measure of fiscal decentralization that accounts for both quantitative subnational expenditure shares and qualitative institutional autonomy, providing a more nuanced characterization of federal fiscal structures. To identify discretionary fiscal responses, I employ the cyclically-adjusted primary budget approach across different government levels and estimate their effects using panel local projections. The findings 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 due to coordination challenges among subnational entities, even when they possess both the resources and autonomy to implement discretionary policies. The results provide novel empirical evidence for potential negative externalities of fiscal decentralization on macroeconomic stabilization capabilities.

  • “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.

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

  • “Foot Voting on Gendered Protective Labor Rights”

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

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