In an imperfectly competitive economy with direct and indirect taxes, the first best wage subsidy overcompensates workers and provides the incentive to misreport working hours. We show that in the second best optimum where the government cannot use a wage subsidy, the optimal policy is to tax...

This paper finds that labor tax cut can be an effective policy tool to mitigate the negative effects of a shock that made the zero lower bound on the nominal interest rate binding if the economy features rule-of-thumb households (besides Ricardian ones) and nominal rigidities in prices and...

The present research shows how entrepreneurial culture contributes to the widely noted difference in entrepreneurial propensities between men and women. The consequences of the assumed differential importance of household and family generate testable hypotheses about the gender effects of...

Distortionary income taxation in a standard New Keynesian model substantially increases the nominal term-premium on long-term bonds relative to a model with lumpsum taxes. Also the empirical level of the nominal term premium can be matched with lower risk-aversion coefficient in case of a model...

This paper estimates labor supply elasticities of married men and women allowing for heterogeneity among couples (in educational attainments of husbands and wives) and explicitly modeling how household members interact and make labor supply decisions. We find that the labor supply decisions of...

A positive joint two-sector productivity shock causes Rybczynski (1955) and Stolper and Samuelson (1941) effects that release leisure time and initially raises the relative price of human capital investment so as to favor it over goods production. This enables a basic RBC model, modified by...

We model pre-euro Spanish monetary policy and use our findings to assess the compatibility of the interest rates set by the ECB since 1999 with Spanish macrofundamentals. We find that in the 1990s Spain implemented successfully a monetary strategy tailored to its own domestic fundamentals; and...