Measures of institutional quality are strong predictors of cross-country differences in income and productivity. The institutional economics literature has long maintained that one way institutions influence economic growth is by impacting the efficient allocation of production factors across...

Allocation of capital, being a finite resource, needs to adopt a well calibrated approach to ensure that the targeted economic priorities are achieved in an optimal manner. Factor shares of income reflect the potential economic priorities more sharply than the overall output and the underlying...

Hochschulen leisten als Produzenten von Humankapital einen wesentlichen Beitrag zur Bildung, Erhaltung und Steigerung des gesamtwirtschaftlichen Humankapitalbestandes. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird eine Abschätzung des Umfanges und der Entwicklung der hochschulbezogenen Humankapitalbestände in...

Recent research has found that the dynamic properties of the New Keynesian model can be very different when the nominal interest rate is zero. Improvements in technology and reductions in the labor tax rate lower economic activity, and the size of the government purchase output multiplier can be...

The United Kingdom employed the McKenna rule to conduct fiscal policy during World War I (WWI) and the interwar period. Named for Reginald McKenna, Chancellor of the Exchequer (1915–16), the McKenna rule committed the United Kingdom to a path of debt retirement, which we show was...

This paper analyzes the connection between the asymmetric tax treatment of homeowners and landlords and the progressivity of income taxation using a quantitative overlapping generations general equilibrium model with housing and rental markets. Our model emphasizes the determinants of tenure...

This paper contributes to the policy evaluation literature by developing new strategies to study alternative policy rules. We compare optimal rules to simple rules within canonical monetary policy models. In our context, an optimal rule represents the solution to an intertemporal optimization...

Based on Austria's fiscal stance in 1995, we compute the generational accounts for currently living as well as future generations. The results reveal the existence of an enormous intergenerational imbalance in favor of currently living generations. Total public sector liabilities may be more...

In this paper, we develop a financial stress index for France that can be used as a real-time composite indicator for the state of financial stability in France. We take 17 financial variables from different market segments and extract a common stress component using a dynamic approximate factor...

This paper analyzes the role of nominal assets in ranking intertemporal budget policies in a growing open economy. The budget policies are ranked in terms of the public's intertemporal stock of tax liabilities. Our main result is that, in a small open economy, the valuation of private and public...