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Raphaël Parchet

I am Full Professor at the Università della Svizzera italiana - USI.

I joined the Università della Svizzera italiana in 2013 after one year of post-doctoral research at the University of Basel and the University of Lausanne. I obtained my PhD in Economics from the University of Lausanne in 2012.

My main research interests are in fiscal federalism, tax competition and regional economics.

I was awarded the following FNS grants:

"Institutional Foundations of Industrialization, Financialization, and Globalization of the Swiss Economy. Evidence from 140 Years of the Commercial Registry". Sinergia Project joint with Elliott Ash (ETH), Marco d'Ambros (USI) and Tina Freyburg (UNISG). 2022-2026. [Project description]
"Firms and tax competition in the digital economy: a data platform for geo-temporal network analysis'' (co-project leader with Marco d'Ambros), starting in February 2020 (NRP 77 "Digital Transformation"). 2020-2024. [Project description]
"Sorting, Tax Competition and the Rise of Local Tax Havens", starting in 2019-2023. [Project description]
"Fiscal Rules, Fiscal Performance and Tax Competition among Swiss Municipalities", 2015-2019 [Project description].

I am the Director of the Center for Federalism [website] at the Università della Svizzera italiana. I was part of the Sinergia project "The Swiss Confederation: A Natural Laboratory for Research on Fiscal and Political Decentralization" [website].

Main publications:

"Who Bears the Burden of Local Taxes" (with Marius Brülhart, Jayson Danton and Jörg Schläpfer). American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. 17(1). February 2025, pp. 464-505.
"Highways, Market Access, and Spatial Sorting" (with Stephan Fretz and Frédéric Robert-Nicoud). Economic Journal. 132(643). April 2022, pp. 1011-1036. [doi]. [Data & Replication package].
- Featured in VoxEU and atlantico.
"Are Local Tax Rates Strategic Complements or Strategic Substitutes?". American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. 11(2). May 2019, pp. 189-224.
"Culture and Taxes" (with Beatrix Eugster). Journal of Political Economy. 127(1). February 2019, pp. 296-337. A previous version circulated under the title "Culture and Taxes. Towards Identifying Tax Competition".
"Alleged Tax Competition. The Mysterious Death of Bequest Taxes in Switzerland" (with Marius Brülhart), Journal of Public Economics, 111, March 2014, pp. 63-78.

Working papers:

"Competition, Harmonization and Redistribution: Corporate Taxes in Switzerland" (with Marius Brülhart, Marko Köthenbürger, Matthias Krapf, Kurt Schmidheiny and David Staubli). Current version: NBER Working Paper No 31830. November 2023.
"Sex in the City: The Capitalization of Regulated Prostitution into Housing Prices" (with Marcello Puca, Federica de Rossa and Giovanni Immordino), Current version: October 2022.
"Opening the Labor Market to Qualified Immigrants in the Absence of Linguistic Barriers" (with Nicolò Gatti, Fabrizio Mazzonna and Giovanni Pica). Current version: IZA Discussion paper No 15631. October 2022.

Journalism:

La progressivité indirecte des impôts communaux (avec Marius Brülhart, Jayson Danton and Jörg Schläpfer). La Vie économique, 1-2 2020.
L'impôt sur les successions. Le point du vue de la recherche scientifique (avec Marius Brülhart), La Vie économique, mars 2014
Erbschaftssteuern und Mobilität der Steuerzahler (mit Marius Brülhart), Die Volkswirtschaft, März 2014)

You can download my CV here: [CV]