Corporate Minimum Tax and the Elasticity of Taxable Income: Evidence from Administrative Tax Records, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2025, 17(2): 358-387, with Jaroslav Bukovina, Tomáš Lichard and Branislav Žúdel
Abstract: We examine business responses to a minimum tax that prescribed fixed floors on corporate tax liability while also permitting minimum tax credit carry-forwards. Using 2010-2020 tax-return administrative data on all Slovak corporations, we find that a mass of companies immediately relocated from reporting zero taxable income towards bunching at the new tax floors. We infer the ETI to be between 0.33 and 2.28 across VAT and turnover categories and quantify the marginal efficiency burden of the corporation tax. Given limited extensive-margin business responses, our evidence suggests that the minimum tax reduced the overall efficiency burden while raising additional tax revenue.
Do Elections Accelerate the COVID-19 Pandemic? Journal of Population Economics, 2022, 35(1): 197-240, with René Levínský and Samuel Škoda
Abstract: Elections define representative democracies but also produce spikes in physical mobility if voters need to travel to polling places. In this paper, we examine whether large-scale, in-person elections propagate the spread of COVID-19. We exploit a natural experiment from the Czech Republic, which biannually renews mandates in one-third of Senate constituencies that rotate according to the 1995 election law. We show that in the second and third weeks after the 2020 elections (held on October 9–10), new COVID-19 infections grew significantly faster in voting compared to non-voting constituencies. A temporarily related peak in hospital admissions and essentially no changes in test positivity rates suggest that the acceleration was not merely due to increased testing. The acceleration did not occur in the population above 65, consistently with strategic risk-avoidance by older voters. Our results have implications for postal voting reforms or postponing of large-scale, in-person (electoral) events during viral outbreaks.
Political Salaries, Electoral Selection and the Incumbency Advantage: Evidence from a Wage Reform, Journal of Comparative Economics, 2021, 49(4): 1020-1047, with Filip Pertold
Abstract: Incumbents tend to gain solid electoral advantage in many voting systems. In this study, we examine the relationship between salaries prescribed to politicians and the incumbency advantage by exploiting a political wage reform and data from close elections in a proportional semi-open list system in the Czech Republic. We show that higher salaries reduce the average incumbency advantage, as they increase the probability to run again for previously non-elected candidates much more than for incumbents. Still, we find that higher wages improve candidate selection, especially by encouraging repeated candidacy from university-educated incumbents. Higher wages also improve relative positions of re-running incumbents on candidate lists compared to previously non-elected re-running candidates. Our results overall suggest that incumbency per se changes the relationship between political wages and candidate selection.
Political Representation and Public Contracting: Evidence from Municipal Legislatures, European Economic Review, 2019, 118: 411-431.
Abstract: This study examines how partisan representation in multiparty legislatures affects direct expenditures, contract-allocation design and selection of politically-connected firms as suppliers in public procurement. For identification, I exploit quasi-random variation in partisan electoral outcomes near the effective representation thresholds in Czech proportional municipal elections. My regression discontinuity estimates suggest that partisan representation matters for public procurement: for instance, if local-level political parties barely enter legislatures at the expense of the national parties, municipalities decrease their direct procurement spending and allocate fewer contracts to the corporate donors of the national parties. Fewer contracts are awarded especially in pre-election years and in auctions restricting competition among procurement suppliers. The results are not associated with higher government fragmentation or selection of more competent candidates, but rather with reduced political power of the national parties.
Who Actually Decides? Parental Influence on the Housing Tenure Choice of Their Children, Urban Studies, 2018, 55(2): 406-426, with Martin Lux, Tomáš Samec, Vojtech Bartoš, Petr Sunega, Irena Boumová, Ladislav Kažmér
Abstract: We focus on the role of within-family socialisation and the relationship between socialisation and resource transfers in the intergenerational transmission of housing preferences, the formation of familial housing attitudes and thus the reproduction of a normative housing tenure ladder across generations in Czech society. We show that resource transfers and the within-family socialisation of housing preferences, including preferences concerning housing tenure, are closely interconnected. In other words, parental influence on decision to buy own housing (and on housing preferences in general) of their adult children through socialisation is stronger if there is an (actual or assumed) intergenerational resource transfer. This has several implications for how housing markets and systems work. The paper draws on findings from qualitative, quantitative and experimental studies.
Manipulation of Procurement Contracts: Evidence from the Introduction of Discretionary Thresholds, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2017, 9(2):1-24, with Filip Pertold
Abstract: We present evidence of how policies that create opportunities to avoid open competition in procurement lead to the manipulation of procurement values. We exploit a policy reform in which public bodies were given the autonomy to preselect potential contractors below newly defined discretionary thresholds. Manipulation is revealed through bunching of procurements just below the thresholds in construction works and services, and to a lesser degree, in goods. Among manipulated contracts, we document a threefold increase in the probability that procurements are allocated to anonymous firms, which can hide their owners. This sorting violates assumptions behind regression-discontinuity designs.