This paper presents a model of a multinational firm's optimal debt policy that incorporates international taxation factors. The model yields the prediction that a multinational firm's indebtedness in a country depends on a weighted average of national tax rates and differences between national...

This paper surveys policy responses in recent years to capital inflows in a diverse group of countries that are represented by the Netherlands at the IMF Executive Board. Based on the findings from cross-country empirical literature, the paper distills some guiding principles for policy...

Tax incentives have been used extensively in the countries of the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) to promote investment. The associated revenue losses are large, and benefits in terms of new investment have been limited, raising doubts about the cost effectiveness of the tax incentive...

This paper assesses the roles of shocks, rules, and institutions as possible sources of procyclicality in fiscal policy. By employing parametric and nonparametric techniques, I reach the following four main conclusions. First, policymakers' reactions to the business cycle is different depending...

The paper assesses the United Kingdom's golden rule and debt rule against "ideal characteristics" of fiscal rules. It concludes that they are clearly defined; transparent in institutional arrangements and measurement; adequate to ensure sustainability; and strike a good balance between flexibility...

In the context of the current tax policy debate in the United States, this paper reviews and discusses some of the main recurrent themes, as well as some of the most important tax reform proposals put forward over the past two decades. It finds that although there seems to be widespread...

This paper investigates if there are circumstances where time-varying tax rates could improve welfare and whether such policy can effectively be implemented in practice. While, in principle, variable taxes could improve welfare in some cases, the paper highlights the very particular...

We estimate tax multipliers in a "Blanchard-Yaari" consumption model where Ricardian equivalence is broken because the private sector discounts the future at a faster rate than the real rate of interest. The model fits U.S. data since 1955 extremely well-entailing a discount wedge of around 20...

We re-examine the extent to which personal taxes on dividends are capitalized into the equity prices of domestic firms, using data from around the time of the 1997 U.K. dividend tax reform, which removed a significant tax credit for an important group of investors: U.K. pension funds. The...

The main tasks of central banks are to secure price and financial stability. These objectives can, in times of crises, conflict with one another, and the central bank may have to renounce one of them in order to secure the other. In a monetary union, this trade-off can be exacerbated by the...