We extend previous work on the sustainability of the government’s intertemporal budget constraint by allowing for non-linear adjustment of the fiscal variables, conditional on (i) the sign of budgetary disequilibria and (ii) the phase of the economic cycle. Further, our endogenously estimated...

We study how rich shareholders can use their economic power to deregulate firms that they own, thus skewing the income distribution towards themselves. Agents differ in productivity and choose how much labor to supply. High productivity agents also own shares in the productive sector and thus...

This paper intends to make a two-fold contribution to the literature. First, it studies a political economy model of family taxation using a household economics approach to behaviour; the nature of the winning policy is found to depend on whether i) the parents control their fertility or not,...

During the last three decades there has been an almost continuous undermining of the public interest by private interests operating either outside or inside Greek public administration. The result of this infiltration has been a gradual loss of bureaucratic autonomy to pursue the public...

We explore the benefits of intergenerational risk-sharing through both private funded pensions and via the public debt. We use a multi-period overlapping generations model with a PAYG pension pillar, a funded pension pillar and a government. Shocks are smoothed via the public debt and variations...

This paper analyses the dynamic effects of fiscal imbalances in a given EMU member state on the borrowing costs of other countries in the euro area. The estimation of a multivariate, multi-country time series model (specifically a Global VAR, or GVAR) using quarterly data for the EMU period...

We consider an economy where competing political parties alternate in office. Due to rent-seeking motives, incumbents have an incentive to set public expenditures above the socially optimum level. Parties cannot commit to future policies, but they can forge a political compromise where each...

In the last decades, the majority of OECD countries has experienced a continuous increase in public debt. The European debt crisis has prompted a fundamental re]evaluation of public debt sustainability and the looming threat of sovereign debt default. Due to a multitude of large scale events in...

France has a track record of persistent general government deficits, partly reflecting pro-cyclical fiscal policies in upswings. This has resulted in a quadrupling of its public debt-to-GDP ratio since the 1970s to above 80% of GDP. Reducing public debt is crucial because a high level of public...