A key input to the capital budgeting process is the cost of capital. Financial managers most often use the CAPM for estimating the cost of capital for which they need to know the market risk premium. Textbooks advocate using the historical value for the U.S. equity premium as the market risk...

Deploying faculty efficiently (or more efficiently) should surely part of any optimizing strategy on the part of a college or university. Basic microeconomics about the "theory of the firm" provide some insight as to how a university would achieve productive efficiency given differences in the...

Many US federal agencies model the economic and budgetary effects of research and development (R&D) investments -- both public R&D and private R&D -- as if R&D were the same as any other form of investment, such as physical capital investment. However, in recent decades a broad base of evidence...

The present paper analyzes the budgetary impact of various Social Security reforms in the Belgian institutional setting. Our approach relies on parameters that were derived in Dellis et alii (2002) using a micro-modeling strategy. focusing our attention on a hypothetical age cohort, we...

The fall in the U.S. public debt/GDP ratio from 106% in 1946 to 23% in 1974 is often attributed to high rates of economic growth. This paper examines the roles of three other factors: primary budget surpluses, surprise inflation, and pegged interest rates before the Fed-Treasury Accord of 1951....

We use discounted cash flow analysis to measure a country's fiscal capacity. Crucially, the discount rate applied to projected cash flows includes a GDP risk premium. We apply our valuation method to the CBO's projections for the U.S. federal government's deficit between 2022 and 2051 and debt...

Single-equation estimates of fiscal reaction functions, which relate primary surpluses to past debt-GDP ratios and control variables, are subject to potentially serious simultaneity bias that can produce misleading inferences about fiscal behavior. Biases arise from failure to model the general...

This paper reviews recent research dealing with fiscal discipline and revisit the issues of fiscal control in federal systems, focusing on selective case studies covering the 2000s, before and after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). We start by contrasting the recent fiscal history of...