Recent research in financial economics has shown that rare large disasters have the potential to disrupt financial sectors via the destruction of capital stocks and jumps in risk premia. These disruptions often entail negative feedback e?ects on the macroecon-omy. Research on disaster risks has...

This paper estimates the carbon leakage rate across countries, arguably a key parameter in the international climate policy discussion including on border carbon adjustment, but which remains subject to significant uncertainty. We propose innovations along two lines. First, we exploit recently...

When the top personal tax rates are above the corporate rate, high-income individuals have an incentive to reclassify their earnings as corporate rather than personal income for tax purposes. U.S. tax law at least imposes strict limits on the extent to which employees in publicly traded...

A defining feature of transition economies is the expansion of the private sector. Motivated by the observation that new enterprises in transition economies seem to have a strong preference for recruiting young people, this paper studies intergenerational redistribution following from market...

This paper assesses sustainable fiscal behavior in an economy where wealth is derived predominantly from a non-renewable resource. It explores the issue in a simple dynamic framework that highlights the structural weaknesses in the underlying budgetary position, takes into account the rate of...

This paper presents a model of optimal taxation in which both private agents and the government can default on their debt. We first consider Ramsey equilibria in which the government can precommit to its policies but in which private agents can default. We then consider sustainable equilibria in...

The main purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of approaches to assessing fiscal sustainability. It summarizes the general analytical background, focusing on the present value budget constraint, which is the benchmark against which solvency is determined, tests of sustainability...

Unlike conventional fiscal sustainability assessments, the Value-at-Risk approach developed in this paper explicitly captures the contribution of key risk variables to public sector vulnerability. In an illustrative application to Ecuador, the VaR approach confirms a significant risk of...

We investigate the impact of remittances on public debt sustainability and detail how the traditional debt-to-GDP ratio can be modified to create a more accurate representation of debt sustainability for a country that receives significant remittance inflows. The main result is that inclusion of...

This paper introduces the Asset and Liability Management (ALM) compound option model. The model builds on the observation that the public sector net worth in a multi-period setting corresponds to the value of an option on an option on total government assets. Hence, the ALM compound option model...