Conference Agenda

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming business operations and global markets, yet little is known about how AI investments spill over across borders. Using a novel panel dataset, we examine the international propagation of U.S. firms’ AI investments, focusing on their European subsidiaries and broader industry-level effects. We find that AI investment strongly predicts growth in foreign subsidiaries’ assets, employment, and revenues, with significant spillovers to European industries exposed to U.S. AI firms. However, these effects vary with local tax policies: countries with attractive R&D tax incentives experience faster and larger AI-driven growth, while low corporate tax rates further amplify revenue spillovers. Our findings highlight the role of fiscal policy in shaping the diffusion of AI and offer new insights into how digital-era investments influence global economic growth.

One of the main insights of public economics is that taxes are not necessarily borne by those who pay the taxes. However, public debates about taxation rarely consider tax shifting. Using corporate taxation as an example, we investigate in a survey experiment whether individuals' preferences for taxation change when they are informed about four channels of tax shifting: prices, wages, owner payouts, or investments. We find that the preferred corporate tax rate decreases when the burden falls onto individuals (in terms of prices and wages), and less so when we reveal the effect on payouts or investments. The change is caused by own perceived costs, distributional concerns seem to play only a limited role for the reaction to the information.

The objective of this article is to show that there is a distorting effect of Cameroon's failing institutional environment on the structure of public expenditure. To study the choices made by public authorities, we rely on a Bayesian model over the period 1970-2020 to determine the occurrence of public investment allocation. It emerges that institutional failure marked by corruption, political and social instability, and approximate compliance with established laws, directs public investment towards types of expenditure for which rent seeking is easier and easily concealed, particularly in physical capital to the detriment of education and health expenditure. In this context, the results also reveal that economic growth is negatively associated with the choice of investing in social projects. Economic policy recommendations are in line with budgetary rebalancing through social investments, which are essential for resolving social crises and improving factor productivity.

This paper studies the relationship between the growth in private capital markets and the rise in economic inequalities over the last two decades in the U.S. Exploiting both company- and state-level variation in exposure to the expanded federal capital gains tax exclusion on qualified small business stock (QSBS), we find that QSBS-eligible companies’ probability of staying private increased by 3.5 percentage points, and that the average income gap between HNWIs and other income earners increased by 7.2%. We show that this rise in income concentration appears to have been driven by HNWIs’ excess returns on their early-stage investments relative to public stock market returns.