Welcome!

I am a PhD student in Economics at the University of Mannheim.
My main research interests are in Public Economics and Development Economics.

Curriculum Vitae

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Working Paper:

Place-based policies, structural change and female labor: Evidence from India's Special Economic Zones
(with Johannes Gallé , Nadine Riedel and Tobias Seidel)
Journal of Public Economics, revise and resubmit

| Abstract | This paper quantifies the local economic impact of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) that were established in India between 2005-2013. Based on a novel data set that combines census data on the universe of Indian firms with georeferenced data on SEZs, we find that SEZs increased manufacturing and service employment with positive spillover effects up to 10km. This employment gain was paralleled by a decline in local agricultural employment, in particular of women, suggesting that the policy contributed to structural change. We find no evidence for heterogeneous effects between privately and publicly run SEZs or zones with different industry denominations. |

[STEG/CEPR Working Paper] [Video Interview with faculti.net]

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Work in Progress:

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Bargaining over Taxes
(with Eliya Lungu)
IGC grant (10,000 GBP)

Abstract

This paper shows that bargaining over tax payments is a prevalent mode of tax compliance and enforcement in lower income countries. Using administrative data on the universe of turnover tax filings from Zambia, we document strong and sharp bunching (i) in strictly dominated regions where firms would be better off by reducing turnover and (ii) at amounts which imply round number tax liabilities. These observations reject predictions from standard models of tax compliance, but can be rationalized when interpreting tax payments as outcomes of bargaining between taxpayers and tax collectors. We conduct a survey of more than 500 firms in Zambia and document that discussing tax payments with officials before filing tax returns is a widespread phenomenon, lending support to the bargaining channel. Tax audit data as well as a randomized survey experiment provide evidence against competing explanations such as poor record-keeping or audit experiences for the observed bunching behavior. Finally, we propose a theoretical framework to explain how and when bargaining over taxes may occur.

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Carbon taxation in emerging economies (with Johannes Gallé, Rodrigo Oliveira, Nadine Riedel and Edson Severnini)
UNU-WIDER grant (10,000 USD)

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Taxing FDI in a developing economy: the case of informality