Dominant groups worldwide have historically asserted power by constructing in public spaces monuments that glorify their narrative, vis-à-vis their opponents’. How do divisive public símbols affect the location choices of those who oppose them? I investigate this historically and today, focusing on Confederate monuments in the US South – erected by southern whites in the early 20th century and opposed by Black Americans due to their connection to slavery. Historically, I show that southern counties with monuments saw a sharp decline in the Black share of the population – driven by out-migration – following their construction. However, monuments themselves are outcomes of underlying ideological shifts, making causal claims problematic. I thus construct an instrument for the stock of Confederate monuments based on transportation costs to a quasi-monopolist producer and the years in which it was in business. The IV analysis confirms that monuments caused a substantial reduction of the Black share of the population. I complement the historical analysis with an online experiment to assess whether monuments still influence migration choices today. I randomize Confederate monuments in the visual depiction of hypothetical destination cities and ask respondents to consider job offers there. Black respondents request higher reservation wages and are significantly less likely to accept offers.

5 de desembre de 2025 – Districte Administratiu, Generalitat de Catalunya – 11h-13h

December 16, 2025 – 14.30h – Room 1038

Enforcing wealth tax compliance among high-net-worth individuals is particularly challenging. Using administrative data on the Net Wealth Tax for Catalan taxpayers over the 2011–2020 period, this paper evaluates the impact of audits on voluntary compliance. The evidence suggests that wealth tax audits do enhance compliance, but the impact is short-lived — and driven by taxpayers rebalancing their tax evasion and avoidance responses. On the institutional side, the results indicate that Spain’s overlapping tax audit mandates can create coordination frictions that reduce the efficiency and effectiveness of audit-based enforcement of the New Wealth Tax. Effective enforcement depends not only on robust audit strategies, but also on coherent institutional design and sound tax policy.

Well-designed federal government structures manage to reconcile the centralized provision of pure public goods (Federalist Papers, No. 30) with improvements in allocative efficiency through the decentralized provision of other public goods (Oates, 1972). In Spain, the best recent example of the provision of pure public goods – including collaboration with a supranational level of government, i.e. the EU – was the management of COVID-19 (e.g. the provision of vaccines or granting of financial aid to the hardest-hit economic sectors). As for the latter case, Espasa et al. (2017) found that decentralization of welfare state policies led to improvements in public satisfaction.

November 4, 2025 – 14.30h – Room 1038