Fiscal Transfers in the Spatial Economy
研究了财政转移如何影响区域差距、国家产出和福利，以德国为例发现转移缩小了区域差距但降低了产出，却因缓解大城市过度拥挤而小幅提升福利。
Many countries shift substantial public resources across jurisdictions to mitigate spatial economic disparities. We use a general equilibrium model with multiple asymmetric regions, labor mobility, and costly trade to carve out the aggregate implications of fiscal transfers. Calibrating the model for Germany, we find that transfers indeed deliver smaller disparities across regions. This comes at the cost of lower national output, however, because economic activity is diverted away from core cities and toward remote areas with low productivity. But despite this loss in output per capita by about 2 percent in our baseline specification, welfare still increases by 0.07 percent because the transfer scheme countervails overcongestion in large cities. If the optimal transfer regime was implemented, welfare would increase by 0.06 percent.