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...

We investigate empirically the effect of government purchases on unemployment in 20 OECD countries, for the period 1960-2007. Compared to earlier studies we use a data set with more variation in unemployment, and which allows for controlling for a host of factors that influence the effect of...

Previous studies used general government data to examine whether national governments' electoral motives and ideology influenced budget composition in OECD countries. General government data includes, however, the state and local level. Using new data for general and central government over the...

This paper studies the interplay between the wage gap and government spending in a small open economy facing a shock in trade policy. We consider a specific factor model with an export sector, which uses skilled labour, and an import-competing sector, which uses unskilled labour. We find the...

We focus on the link between political instability due to uncertain electoral outcomes and economic growth, through the impact on a government's decisions on how to allocate government expenditure between public consumption and investment. Using an endogenous growth model with partisan electoral...

We assess notably how do extreme events affect the public sector efficiency of decentralized governance. Hence, we empirically link the public sector efficiency scores, to tax revenue and spending decentralization. First, we compute government spending efficiency scores via data envelopment...

We assess the consequences of fiscal consolidation episodes on public sector efficiency (scores) for 35 OECD countries for the 2007-2020 period. We find that fiscal consolidations improve public sector efficiency and results are robust across efficiency models. Moreover, peripheral euro-area...

This study examines the effects of the tax structure composition for public sector efficiency in a sample of 41 developing countries for the period between 1997-2019. We start by calculating Public Sector Performance (PSP) composite indicators and use them as outputs to compute data envelopment...

This paper estimates and quantifies the impact of structural reforms on per capita income for a large set of OECD and non-OECD countries. The findings suggest that the quality of institutions matters to a large extent for economic outcomes. More competition-friendly regulations, as measured by...