Contributor : Profile

David R. Agrawal is an Assistant Professor in the Martin School of Public Policy & Administration and the Department of Economics at the University of Kentucky and an affiliate member in the CESifo Network.

He completed his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Michigan (2012) after completing his M.P.P. from the University of California, Berkeley (2007) and his undergraduate studies at the University of Connecticut (2005).

David’s primary field of research is public finance – with an emphasis on taxation and fiscal federalism.

David’s research agenda focuses on theoretical and empirical ways of incorporating spatial relationships into models of tax competition. His most recent work studies how variation in Internet penetration affects municipal sales tax rates. David is also researching whether local taxes fall or rise as a function of distance to the nearest state border. Additional work analyzes how the strategic reaction to vertical externalities varies within a federation if the federal government has multiple horizontal competitors. He has also studied the optimality of preferential tax zones near state and international borders.