The 2008 financial crisis is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1929. It has been characterised by a housing bubble in a context of rapid credit expansion, high risk-taking and exacerbated financial leverage, leading to deleveraging and credit crunch when the bubble burst....

Taxes and cash transfers reduce income inequality more in France than elsewhere in the OECD, because of the large size of the flows involved. But the system is complex overall. Its effectiveness could be enhanced in many ways, for example so as to achieve the same amount of redistribution at...

As the COVID-19 pandemic has shaped public policies and government finances, it has also influenced the topics that public finance economists are researching. Because the 2020 International Institute of Public Finance (IIPF) Congress featured papers that were submitted prior to the start of the...

In this paper, we study the aggregate and distributional implications of a smaller public sector in the euro area. By a smaller public sector, we mean a reduction in public debt and/or cuts in public spending, when such changes in fiscal policy are accommodated by adjustment in various taxes....

Estimated labor supply functions are important tools when designing an optimal income tax or calculating the effect of tax reforms. It is therefore of large importance to use estimation methods that give reliable results and to know their properties. In this paper Monte Carlo simulations are...

In 2006, the reform of the German fiscal constitution realigned legislative powers between the federal and the state governments. Since 2007, the German state governments have been allowed to design real estate transfer tax rates. We investigate whether government ideology predicts the levels...

In this paper, we analyze whether the complexity of tax bills affects financial markets. Based on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level of the 32 tax bills identified by Romer and Romer (2010) in the period 1962–2003, we assess the relationship between tax bills' complexity and financial markets...