Publications

• Universalization and the Origins of Fiscal Capacity
  Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2026
  [DOI] [arXiv]
• The Taxing Challenges of the State: Unveiling the Role of Fiscal and Administrative Capacity in Development (with Federica Braccioli, Amedeo Piolatto, and Antoine Zerbini)
  CESifo Economic Studies, 2025
  [DOI] [BSE Working Paper]

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Working Papers

1. Taxing Moral Agents: Fiscal Capacity and the Redistributive State
   [CESifo Working Paper No. 9867]

   Abstract (click to expand)

   How does taxpayer morality shape optimal taxation? I study universalization preferences: agents ask what public good taxes would fund if everyone earned as they do. Universalization makes the elasticity of taxable income endogenous to morality. A moral agent values the public good funded by her taxes, which dampens her taxable-income response. Morality expands fiscal capacity. With concave consumption utility, a redistributive state emerges above a threshold of average morality. In a calibration, moving from low to high morality raises the optimal tax rate from 27% to 51%. The fiscal-capacity result extends to small nonlinear tax reforms under progressivity conditions.

   JEL: H21, H41, D64, D91
   Keywords: Homo moralis, universalization, elasticity of taxable income, optimal taxation, public goods, sufficient statistics

   Presentations: IIPF Congress 2022 (Linz), CESifo Area Conference on Public Economics 2022, FAIR center workshop, Max Planck Institute for Public Goods and Tax Law

2. Competing for Donations: The Role of Tax Deductibility in the U.S. Charitable Sector [new version coming soon]

   Abstract (click to expand)

   Around the world, governments provide tax benefits to incentivize charitable giving. I argue that the current approaches to determining the optimal level of such tax benefits neglect a crucial ingredient. While higher tax benefits increase charitable giving, they also intensify potentially wasteful competition for funds among charities. I build a model where charities use informative advertising to attract individual donors. Competition leads to inefficient fundraising as charities incur excessive advertising costs, and the inefficiency increases as available funds increase. I then estimate the structural parameters of the model using data from the universe of Nonprofits in the U.S. paired with data from the country's most prominent charity assessment organization. I document that leakage, the proportion of charities' budget not spent on direct public good provision, goes up to 40 percent in my sample for 2014. Moreover, findings from counterfactual analyses suggest that fundraising accounts for significant endogenous leakage of gross donations into advertising. These findings suggest that estimates that ignore competition must be adjusted downwards to account for charities' endogenous responses to the tax code.

   Presentations: BSE Summer Forum 2024, EWMES23 (Manchester), EARIE 2023 (Rome), IIPF 2023 (Logan, Utah), CEA 2023, ESA World Meeting 2022 (Boston), European ESA Meeting 2022 (Bologna), Mannheim Taxation Conference 2022

3. The sustainability of contribution norms with income dynamics (with Pau Juan-Bartroli)
   [arXiv]

   Abstract (click to expand)

   The sustainability of cooperation is crucial for understanding the progress of societies. We study a repeated game in which individuals decide the share of their income to transfer to other group members. A central feature of our model is that individuals may, with some probability, switch incomes across periods—our measure of income mobility—while the overall income distribution remains constant over time. We analyze how income mobility and income inequality affect the sustainability of contribution norms—informal agreements about how much each member should transfer to the group. We find that greater income mobility facilitates cooperation. In contrast, the effect of inequality is ambiguous and depends on the progressivity of the contribution norm and the degree of mobility. We apply our framework to an optimal taxation problem to examine the interaction between public and private redistribution.