We study the dynamic Ramsey problem of finding optimal public debt and linear taxes on capital and labor income within a tractable infinite horizon model with incomplete markets. With zero public expenditure and debt, it is optimal to tax the risky labor income and subsidize capital, while a...

This paper studies the effect of two labor market institutions, unemployment insurance (UI) and job search assistance (JSA), on the output cost and welfare cost of recessions. The paper develops a tractable incomplete-market model with search unemployment, skill depreciation during unemployment,...

We study the effects of an annuity market imperfection on individual agents' labour supply and retirement decisions and on the macroeconomic growth rate in an overlapping generations model with endogenous growth. We model imperfect annuities by introducing a load factor on the interest rate...

In this paper we examine the importance of imperfect competition in product and labour markets in determining the long-run welfare effects of tax reforms assuming agent heterogeneity in capital holdings. Each of these market failures, independently, results in welfare losses for at least a...

This paper estimates the effects of tax changes on the U.K. economy. Identification is achieved by isolating the ‘exogenous' tax policy shocks in the post-war U.K. economy using a narrative strategy as in Romer and Romer (2010). The resulting tax changes are shown to be unforecastable on the...

This paper investigates the impact of fiscal policy on profits using panel data for 19 high-income OECD countries during the period 1975-1999. We estimate a profit equation in which profits depend on a set of fiscal variables. Our empirical method is based on a consistent treatment of the...

This paper presents empirical evidence against the popular perception that macro volatility is exogenous. We obtain tax effects on macro aggregates in the stochastic neoclassical model. Taxes are shown to affect the second moment of output growth rates without affecting the first moment....

We challenge the “OECD view” (Arnold et al. 2011) according to which a shift from direct to indirect taxation is associated with higher long-run economic growth. We study the relationships between per capita GDP, overall tax revenue and tax composition (in particular direct vs. indirect...

This paper undertakes a normative investigation of the quantitative properties of optimal tax smoothing in a business cycle model with state contingent debt, capital-skill complementarity, endogenous skill formation and stochastic shocks to public consumption as well as total factor and capital...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the relationship between fiscal illusion and the shadow economy for 104 countries over the period 1989-2009. We argue that both unobservable phenomena are closely linked to each other, as the creation of a fiscal illusion may be helpful if governments...