This paper provides novel evidence on the impact of tax decentralization on citizens’ preferences for redistribution. The study leverages results from a large-scale survey experiment implemented in Spain. The experimental design is based on an information treatment which explains the normative power of regional governments in personal income taxation, a feature mostly unknown at baseline. First-stage results show that the treatment increases the salience of this characteristic by 40 percentage points. The treatment increases respondents’ aversion against inequality but decreases their suport for higher taxes on the rich. Both results are explained by the identities of respondents. The effect on inequality is driven by individuals with a stronger regional than national identity, while the rejection of higher taxes on the richis driven by participants which identify more with the nation than the region. Heterogeneous effects on trust in central or regional governments confirm this pattern. These results shed light on the role of identity in shaping preferences for redistribution and provide novel evidence that redistributive policies work as a local public good when local attachment of citizens is large.

El Instituto de Economía de Barcelona (IEB) acaba de publicar su MEMORIA ANUAL en la que se recoge la actividad de la entidad a lo largo de 2025. Tal como refleja el documento, 2025 ha sido otro año productivo en el logro de los objetivos principales del IEB: por un lado, promover y difundir la…

June 9, 2026 – 16h – Room 1037

We exploit the sharp escalation in community-based ICE enforcement following the January 2025 inauguration to estimate the causal effect of immigration enforcement on consumer spending. Using Synthetic Difference-in-Differences with cross-state variation in surge intensity as the identifying variation, we find that states experiencing the largest enforcement surges saw aggregate card spending decline by 1.7 percentage points relative to their SDiD counterfactual, an effect robust to covariate adjustment, alternative shock windows, and pre-tariff truncation. Null estimates for non-in-person spending rule out a broad regional demand shock, while null estimates for jail-based arrests (enforcement invisible to surrounding communities) isolate enforcement visibility as the operative mechanism. Sector-level estimates reveal two empirically distinct channels: in states with Democratic governors, aggregate spending fell by −4.1 pp (p < 0.01), driven by large declines in Accommodation and Food Services (−2.3 pp) and Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation (−7.3 pp), consistent with behavioral withdrawal from public commercial life in jurisdictions where community enforcement was most visible. In Trump-voting states, Home Improvement Centers and Transportation and Warehousing spending fell by −3.8 pp (p < 0.1) and −3.0 pp (p < 0.01) respectively, consistent with labor supply disruption among undocumented workers in construction and logistics. Our results indicate that the economic costs of enforcement extend well beyond the directly targeted population and depend critically on whether enforcement is visible to the surrounding community — not merely on its scale.

May 26, 2026 – 14.30h – Room 1038

June 30, 2026 – 14h – Room 1037