We study the impact of a one-off exogenous fiscal windfall on local public finances in the canton of Zurich in Switzerland. The windfall was due to the IPO of Glencore on the London Stock Exchange in 2011. As a result, its CEO paid an extraordinary tax bill of approximately CHF 360 million....

We assess the role that nontradable goods play as a determinant of fiscal spending multipliers, making use of a two-sector model. While fiscal multipliers increase with the share of nontradable goods, an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between multiplier size and the import share....

We evaluate the impact of government spending efficiency on fiscal sustainability for a panel of 35 OECD countries during the period of 2007-2020. To answer our research question we first compute the magnitude of the responses of government revenues to changes in government spending. Next, we...

We analyze how the combined effect of automatic stabilizers and discretionary changes in tax-benefit systems have affected the cushioning of income shocks in the Euro zone and the EU-27 in the period 2007–2014. We propose a new summary measure of the combined effect of automatic stabilizers...

We provide a comprehensive survey of the recent literature on the link between productive government expenditure and economic growth. Starting with the seminal paper of Robert Barro (1990) we show that an understanding of the core results of the ensuing contributions can be gained from the study...

Current policy initiatives taken by the EU and the OECD aim at abolishing preferential corporate tax regimes. This note extends Keen's (2001) analysis of symmetric capital tax competition under preferential (or discriminatory) and non-discriminatory tax regimes to allow for countries of...

We explore the reaction of the euro area periphery sovereigns' fiscal positions to an unconventional monetary policy shock. We estimate panel vector autoregressive (VAR) models over the period 2010-2018, and identify the shock by imposing sign restrictions. Our results suggest that the...

This paper studies the design of the policy mix in a monetary union, that is, the institutional arrangement specifying the relationships between the various policymakers present in the union and the extent of their capacity of action. It is assumed that policymakers do not cooperate. Detailing...

We examine the effect of population size on government size for a panel of 130 countries for the period between 1970 and 2014. We show that previous analyses of the nexus between population size and government size are incorrectly specified and fail to consider the influence of cross-sectional...

This paper characterises rules-based fiscal policy setting. Basically, we translate a standard monetary policy rule into a simple fiscal policy rule. We then infer on fiscal policymakers' reaction coefficients by testing the rule with GMM. Interaction is also tested directly by the inclusion of...