There is a renewed interest in political science on how political risk affects multinational corporations operating in emerging markets. Most existing studies suffer from data problems where researchers can only offer indirect evidence of the relationship between political institutions and...

In a recent edition of Perspectives on Politics, Larry Bartels examines the high levels of support for tax cuts signed into law by President Bush in 2001. In so doing, he characterizes the opinions of “ordinary people” as being based on “simple-minded and sometimes misguided considerations...

Tax Burden, defined as the ratio of total tax revenues over personal income, is prominently used to summarize state tax policy. We analyze the empirical relationship between changes in Tax Burden and changes in state tax policy from 1987 to 2000 – as measured by states’ own forecasts of the...

This paper studies the effects of distortionary taxes and public investment in an endogenous growth OLG model with knowledge transmission. Fiscal policy affects growth in two respects: First, work time reacts to variations of prospective tax rates and modifies knowledge formation; second, public...

Meeting government revenue needs without inhibiting private sector development is a key challenge of tax policy during the transition from the socialist system. The paper explores issues in the design of tax bases and tax structures in the transition and argues that transition economies would...

Phased-in tax reductions are a common feature of tax legislation. This paper uses a dynamic general equilibrium model to quantify the effects of delaying tax cuts. According to the analysis of the model, the phased-in tax cuts of the 2001 tax law substantially reduced employment, output, and...

Subsequent to the economic difficulties of the 1980s, many Latin American governments reluctantly began to introduce market-oriented reform measures. In many cases, the new measures were adopted only as a means of participating in debt-relief programs such as the Brady Initiative. In no case,...

Impacts of the availability of low cost computing power on macroeconometric forecasting and research in Latin America are widespread. One of the most immediate effects of the adoption of microcomputing hardware was more rapid adoption of new econometric estimation techniques. Easier development...

We examine the extent, causes and consequences of the use of foreign currency as a co-circulating medium of exchange and store of value in Latin America. Using new estimates of the amount of foreign currency in circulation in the form of US dollars, we obtain unique measures of currency...

We analyze empirically whether the emergence of China as a large recipient of FDI has affected the amount of FDI received by Latin American countries. For the longest time span possible given data availability (from 1984 to 2001), we do not find a substitution from Latin American inward FDI to...