We use the Euler equation to put forward a back-on-the-envelope rule for the global carbon tax based on a two-box carbon cycle with temperature lag, and a constant elasticity of marginal damages with respect to GDP. This tax falls with time impatience and intergenerational inequality aversion...

This paper derives arbitrage trading strategies taking into account the fact that the actions of arbitrageurs impact prices. This avoids the difficulty of having to rely on exogenous position limits to prevent infinite arbitrage profits. When arbitrageurs are financially constrained their...

Recent empirical tests of dynamic optimal seigniorage models focus on their `smoothing' and long-run implications. The models also imply that the optimal policies are forward looking; that is seigniorage revenues depend on expected future government expenditures. We report causality tests of...

A central tenet of the Maastricht Treaty is that a successful European Monetary Union requires sustainable public finances of its member states. Yet there is no clear definition of sustainability. The economist’s common use of the term builds on the concept of an intertemporal budget...

Conventional wisdom argues that spending levels and, by extension, budget deficits will be higher for governments using bottom-up instead of top-down methods of budgeting. Ferejohn and Krehbiel (1987) appear to debunk this argument. They indicate that the superiority of one method over the other...

East Germany remains unique among the transition economies. Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it became part of the Federal Republic of Germany. German Union meant the transplantation of West Germany's legal, administrative and economic infrastructure to the five new Länder. The...

This paper presents a model of electoral accountability to compare the public finance outcomes under a presidential-congressional and a parliamentary system. In a presidential-congressional system, contrary to a parliamentary system, there are no endogenous incentives for legislative cohesion,...

The recent literature on endogenous economic growth allows for the effects of fiscal policy on long-term growth. If the social rate of return on investment exceeds the private return, tax policies that encourage investment can raise the growth rate and levels of utility. An excess of the social...

The paper presents a theoretical analysis of the relationship between privatization and public deficit finance. We examine the optimal magnitude of public asset sales and the extent to which privatization can be used to reduce taxes, or, to retire public debt, for two cases. In the first,...

How to use an unexpected increase in tax revenues (tax pots) has been an important issue in most OECD countries in the second half of the 90’s, the question being more precisely what to do with those windfall revenues: decreasing taxes, debt, increasing expenditures? In this paper, we study...