This paper assesses the merits of using business perceptions of growth constraints as a guide to growth-enhancing fiscal policy reforms. Using endogenous growth models in which the government levies an income tax to provide public inputs to the production of private firms, the paper demonstrates...

We examine the long-run GDP impacts of changes in total government expenditure and in the shares of different spending categories for a sample of OECD countries since the 1970s, taking account of methods of financing expenditure changes and possible endogenous relationships. We provide more...

This paper examines the extent to which projected aggregate tax revenue changes, association with population ageing over the next 50 years, can be expected to finance expected increases in social welfare expenditures. Projections from two separate models, dealing with social expenditures and...

With integrated trade and financial markets, a collapse in aggregate demand in a large country can cause "natural real interest rates" to fall below zero in all countries, giving rise to a global "liquidity trap." This paper explores the optimal policy response to this type of shock, when...

The macroeconomic theories and models favoured by academics, as well as those used more commonly by policymakers, effectively rule out by assumption economic and financial crises of the sort we are living through. In particular, the longer run dangers posed by the rapid expansion of credit and...

Remarks before the Dallas Friday Group, Dallas, Texas, October 21, 2011 ; "Absent some shock, I envision a slow but steady improvement in the economy into 2012. That is, if our fiscal authorities will remove their stranglehold on clarifying fiscal initiatives. If not, then, in my view, I expect...

Remarks before the Dallas Friday Group, Dallas, Texas, April 11, 2006 ; "Competition brings benefits to the public sector the same way it does the private sector. Because factors of production are increasingly mobile in an era of globalization, governments vie to gain and hold onto them. Mobile...

Remarks before the 2010 Pre-Session Legislative Conference, Austin, Texas, December, 2010 ; "With each passing year, Texas has consistently outperformed the rest of the nation in growing economic prosperity. Over the past three especially difficult years, the Texas economy has outperformed all...