Contact: m1donald@ucsd.edu
I'm an Economics PhD Candidate at the University of California in San Diego. My fields of research are macroeconomics, international economics and international trade.
Before starting my PhD, I worked at the Research Department of the Central Bank of Argentina and studied Economics at the University of Buenos Aires.
You can find my CV here.
In the past two decades, over 30 countries have implemented tax amnesty policies to encour- age the declaration and repatriation of hidden assets, with the goal of increasing government tax revenues. While previous literature has primarily focused on the fiscal impact, this paper studies a less-explored channel: the financial sector expansion resulting from these policies. We examine the macroeconomic effects of Argentina’s 2016 Tax Amnesty, one of the largest programs for disclosing hidden assets, through the financial channel. This amnesty led to an influx of savings into domestic banks, primarily in dollars, equivalent to 1.4% of GDP. We leverage the heterogeneous exposure of banks and firms to this amnesty-induced financial shock to identify bank and firm-level responses. We find that more exposed banks significantly increased their lending compared to less exposed ones. Firms connected to banks with higher exposure experienced increased borrowing, along with a boost in imports, exports and em- ployment. Our findings reveal that tax amnesty policies can stimulate economic growth by expanding the financial sector, demonstrating effects beyond their direct fiscal impact. These results are particularly relevant for countries with underdeveloped financial systems, where the potential for growth through improved access to capital is significant.
We propose a novel rationale for nationally designed place-based policies: imperfect competition in local labor markets. To outline and analyze the implications of this mechanism for welfare and policy, we develop a spatial equilibrium model where firms have market power in both labor and product markets. Market power in local labor markets distorts the allocation of resources within and across regions, implying different industrial efficiencies and returns to scale across space. Solving the problem of a planner, we show that place-based industrial policy can be optimal even absent redistributional motives, because it addresses inefficiencies arising from market power. Moreover, such policy must be designed at the national level, to account for how an integrated goods market transmits local labor market imperfections across regions. To quantify the importance of our theoretical results, we study the effects of the German place-based policies aimed at eliminating disparities between the Western and Eastern states.