We explore the impact of a tax reform in some provinces of China which eliminated the value-added tax on some investment goods. While the goal of the experiment was to encourage upgrading of technology, our results suggest that there was no evident increase overall in fixed investment, and...

When TANF replaced AFDC in 1996 the marginal subsidy for state welfare spending was eliminated. This paper exploits data from a period in the history of AFDC when the structure of federal subsidies and legislative changes allow us to estimate not only the price and income elasticities of federal...

Control of public spending and revenues is increasingly being left to states and localities. In order to understand the consequences of such a movement on the distribution of social spending, it is necessary to understand how fiscal distress will affect state and local budgets. This paper...

This paper estimates the degree to which state spending is influenced by the spending of neighboring states. Focusing on mandated increases in welfare spending, I find that each dollar of state spending causes spending in neighboring states to increase by 37 to 88 cents. I use more plausibly...

Many states are under court-order to reduce local disparities in education spending. While a substantial body of literature suggests that these orders and the resulting school finance equalizations have increased the level and progressivity of state education spending, there is little evidence...

In order to encourage anti-drug policing, both the federal government and many state governments have enacted laws that allow police agencies to keep a substantial fraction of assets that they seize in drug arrests. By adjusting their own allocations to police budgets, however, county...

Relying upon a standard New Keynesian DSGE, we propose an explanation for two empirical findings in the international finance literature. First, the unbiasedness hypothesis – the proposition that expost exchange rate depreciation matches interest differentials – is rejected much more...

Using the "trilemma indexes" developed by Aizenman et al. (2008) that measure the extent of achievement in each of the three policy goals in the trilemma--monetary independence, exchange rate stability, and financial openness--we examine how policy configurations affect macroeconomic...

Uncovered interest parity (UIP) has been almost universally rejected in studies of exchange rate movements, although there is little consensus on why it fails. In contrast to previous studies, which have used relatively short-horizon data, we test UIP using interest rates on longer-maturity...

We develop a methodology that intuitively characterizes the choices countries have made with respect to the trilemma during the post Bretton-Woods period. The paper first outlines the new metrics for measuring the degree of exchange rate flexibility, monetary independence, and capital account...