Kurt Schmidheiny

The Effect of Information and Communication Technologies on Urban Structure

Two innovations in the last century have changed dramatically the cost of communicating and transmitting information: The first is the widespread adoption of telephony; the second is the internet. We study the implications of these changes in ICT for urban structure. We find robust evidence that increases in the number of telephone lines per capita lead to a more concentrated distribution of city sizes and so correspondingly to more dispersion in the distribution of economic activity in space. The evidence on internet usage is more speculative, although it goes in the same direction. This empirical result is rationalized in a theoretical model.

Multistep Predictions from Multivariate ARMA-GARCH: Models and their Value for Portfolio Management

In this paper we derive the closed form solution for multistep predictions of the conditional means and their covariances from multivariate ARMA-GARCH models. These are useful e.g. in mean variance portfolio analysis when the rebalancing frequency is lower than the data frequency. In this situation the conditional mean and covariance matrix of the sum of the higher frequency returns until the next rebalancing period is required as input in the mean variance portfolio problem. The closed form solution for this quantity is derived as well. We assess the empirical value of the result by evaluating and comparing the performance of quarterly and monthly rebalanced portfolios using monthly MSCI index data across a large set of ARMA-GARCH models. The results forcefully demonstrate the substantial value of multistep predictions for portfolio management.

Taxes in Cities

Most cities enjoy some autonomy over how they tax their residents, and that autonomy is typically exercised by multiple municipal governments within a given city. In this chapter, we document patterns of city-level taxation across countries, and we review the literature on a number of salient features affecting local tax setting in an urban context. In OECD countries, urban local governments on average raise some 10% of total tax revenue, and in non-OECD countries, they raise around half that share. We show that most cities are highly fragmented: urban areas with more than 500,000 inhabitants are divided into 74 local jurisdictions on average. The vast majority of these cities are characterized by a central municipality that strongly dominates the remaining jurisdictions in terms of population. These empirical regularities imply that analyses of urban taxation need to take account of three particular features: interdependence among tax-setting authorities (horizontally and vertically), jurisdictional size asymmetries, and the potential for agglomeration economies. We survey the relevant theoretical and empirical literatures, focusing in particular on models of asymmetric tax competition, of taxation and income sorting, and of taxation in the presence of agglomeration rents.

ESTIMATING THE RIVALNESS OF STATE‐LEVEL INWARD FDI

Decentralized fiscal decision making is more likely to be optimal if regional tax bases are non-rival, in the sense that one regions gain is no other relevant regions loss. We develop a method for estimating the rivalness of tax bases using the underlying structures of the conditional logit, Poisson and nested logit models. We use this method to estimate the effect of state-level capital taxation on U.S. inward foreign direct investment. While the results are rather noisy, the assumption of perfect non-rivalenss can in some cases be rejected, but the assumption of perfect rivalness cannot. Competition over FDI across U.S. states may well be a zero-sum game.

Emerging Lessons from Half a Century of Fiscal Federalism in Switzerland

SummaryOver the last six years, researchers collaborating through the SNF Sinergia Project have collected data on fiscal federalism in Switzerland over more than half a century. The analysis of these new data in a range of projects has generated new and robust evidence on fiscal interdependencies among local governments and on behavioral responses of households facing local differences This article presents some of the data collected and reports on nine examples of associated research projects.