The 1993 Finnish tax reform reduced the incentives to use debt financing in home acquisition for high-income households. Before the reform mortgage interest was deductible according to a progressive schedule creating a so-called upside-down effect, which means that the benefit from the deduction...

Abstract: This paper discusses the fiscal policy reactions and economic policies of European countries and the United States during the Great Depression. Economic as well as economic history literature has tended to overlook the fiscal policy aspects of the Great Depression, in particular in...

This paper examines the effects of fiscal policy on private consumption. The paper evaluates the assumption that the effects of fiscal policy are dependent on the public sector's financial situation, which changes the private sector's income expectations. For this purpose regression equations...

This paper deals with the question whether the automatic fiscal stabilisers are strong enough to solve the problem of asymmetric shocks in the Euro area. The question is important for many reasons, for instance in terms of policy coordination and fiscal federalism. The paper reviews the current...

Previous empirical studies have found a positive relationship between the size of legislature and the size of government. Those studies, however, do not adequately address the concerns of endogeneity. In contrast, this paper uses variation in legislature size induced by statutory council size...

This paper re-examines the relationship between government size and output volatility from two perspectives. First, we use a wider international data set of 91 countries over the period 1980?1999 and thus not only the OECD data that have thus far been utilized. Second, we also allow for time...

It is challenging to distinguish the role of information in tax compliance from other factors affecting it. This paper utilizes a novel natural field experiment design to study the issue. In the experiment firms reporting their VAT were sent a letter asking them questions about their attitude...

This dissertation is a collection of three studies whose central theme is the business subsidies policy implemented in Finland during the 1990s by the ministry of Trade and Industry (KTM). The purpose is to examine whether the policy is effective and at the same time explain the rationale behind...