Government is often considered the safe sector of an open economy that provides households with insurance against external risk exposure. Among highly integrated economies, however, households should be able to exploit common financial markets to insure themselves. In this paper we examine the...

This study reconsiders the well-known cross-country positive association between prices and income by focusing on heterogeneity between the inter-developed-country and inter-developing-country relationships. Empirical results reveal not only that developed and developing countries differ in...

We study the differences of currency misalignment estimates obtained from alternative datasets derived from two International Comparison Program (ICP) surveys. A decomposition exercise reveals that the year 2005 misalignment estimates are substantially affected by the ICP price revision....

It is known that anti-social redistributive activities (rent seeking, tax evasion, corruption, violation of property rights, delay of socially beneficial reforms, etc) hurt the macroeconomy. But it is less known what is the role of government size as a determinant of such activities. We use data...

The stylized facts suggest a negative relationship between tax progressivity and the skill premium from the early 1960s until the early 1990s, and a positive one thereafter. They also generally imply rising tax progressivity, except for the 1980s. In this paper, we ask whether optimal tax policy...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model to highlight the role of human capital accumulation of agents differentiated by skill type in the joint determination of social mobility and the skill premium. We first show that our model captures the empirical co-movement of the skill...

In this paper we study the link between elections, fiscal policy and aggregate fluctuations. The set-up is a stylized dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model incorporating both technology and political re-election shocks. The later are incorporated via a two-party model with elections. The...

This paper searches for a general equilibrium model of optimal growth and endogenous fiscal policy with the aim of explaining the interaction between private agents and fiscal authorities in the U.S., West Germany, Japan and the U.K. over the period 1960-1996. Our search is conducted in the...

Even though external debt can play a buffer role against adverse shocks to assist consumption smoothing, it may also exert a volatility amplifying effect, depending on the currency of denomination and the cyclicality of the borrower’s exchange rate. We empirically investigate the nexus between...