The paper examines the scope for mutually beneficial intergenerational cooperation, and looks at various attempts to theoretically explain the emergence of norms and institutions that facilitate this cooperation. After establishing a normative framework, we examine the properties of the...

Newspapers are two-sided platforms that sell their product both to readers and advertisers. Media firms in general, and newspapers in particular, are considered important providers of information, culture and language in most countries. Newspapers are therefore given preferential tax treatment....

The total social benefits of college education exceed the private benefits because the government receives a share of the monetary returns in the form of income taxes. We study the policy implications of this fiscal externality in an optimal dynamic tax framework. Using a variational approach we...

This paper examines the effect of taxes on the individuals' choices of educational direction, and thus on the economy's skill composition. A proportional labour income tax induces too many workers with high innate ability to choose an educational type with high consumption value and low effort...

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 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...

A number of recent studies regress a “narratively” identified measure of a macroeconomic shock directly on an outcome variable. In this note, we argue that this approach can be viewed as the reduced-form regression of an instrumental variable approach in which the narrative time series is...