Many important questions in the field of public finance can be viewed as problems involving public policies in open economies. This paper draws together, from that perspective, a wide range of topics in public economics, emphasizing the implications of resource mobility for our understanding of...

The transfer elasticity of income tax rates is an important parameter in public finance. Given the significant fiscal autonomy of Swiss municipalities, Switzerland is an ideal setting for examining behavioral responses to tax policy. Using a regression kink design, we find robust causal evidence...

How does competition affect information acquisition of firms and thus the response of inflation and output to monetary policy shocks? This paper addresses these questions in a new dynamic general equilibrium model with both dynamic rational inattention and oligopolistic competition. In the...

This paper studies the role of a lender of last resort (LLR) in a monetary model where a shortage of bank’s monetary reserves (or a banking panic) occurs endogenously. We show that while a discount window policy introduced by the LLR is welfare improving, it reduces the banks’ ex ante...

Stablecoins rise to meet the demand for safe assets in decentralized finance. Stablecoin issuers transform risky reserve assets into tokens of stable values, deploying a variety of tactics. To address the questions on the viability of stablecoins, regulations, and the initiatives led by large...

This paper studies the role of a lender of last resort (LLR) in a monetary model where a shortage of a bank’s monetary reserves (a liquidity crisis) occurs endogenously. We show that discount window lending by the LLR is welfare-improving but reduces banks’ ex-ante incentive to hold monetary...

In this paper we aim to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the fiscal consolidation package adopted recently by the Italian Government in order to achieve a balanced budget by 2013. Revenues are forecasted to increase by more than 3.3 GDP percentage points; these stem mostly from indirect...

The objective of this paper is to gain insights into the relationship between deficit-reducing policies and the evolution of the debt/GDP ratio. We consider past events of fiscal consolidation in a selected group of EU countries, by using the new data set recently made available by Devries et...

We apply a "new" conventional (CAPB-based) measure of fiscal policy, which is less prone to endogeneity issues, and find that a 1-percent of GDP fiscal consolidation leads to the improvement of the current account-to-GDP ratio by approximately 0.8 percent of GDP, while previous research based on...

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...