We provide a model for analyzing effects of the tax system and spending programs on the determination of government spending and taxpayer welfare and show that tax system or spending program which is suboptimal from a Ramsey point of view can improve taxpayer welfare because the system creates...

In a world where the prospects of a global agreement to control greenhouse gas emissions are bleak, the idea of using trade policy as an implicit regulation of foreign emission sources has gained many supporters in countries contemplating unilateral climate policies. Embodied carbon tariffs tax...

Government spending at the zero lower bound (ZLB) is not necessarily welfare enhancing, even when its output multiplier is large. We illustrate this point in the context of a standard New Keynesian model. In that model, when government spending provides direct utility to the household, its...

This paper studies the state-dependence of the output and welfare effects of shocks to government purchases in a canonical medium scale DSGE model. When monetary policy is characterized by a Taylor rule, the output multiplier (the change in output for a one unit change in government spending) is...

Many organizations have budgets that expire at the end of the fiscal year and may face incentives to rush to spend resources on low quality projects at year's end. We test these predictions using data on procurement spending by the U.S. federal government. Spending in the last week of the year...

This paper estimates the total value that individuals derive from their state's tax-and-transfer program, and shows how this value varies by income. The paper decomposes this total value into two components: redistributive value, which is due to predictable changes in income (and family...

This paper presents a dynamic political economy theory of public spending, taxation and debt. Policy choices are made by a legislature consisting of representatives elected by geographically-defined districts. The legislature can raise revenues via a distortionary income tax and by borrowing....

Do mandatory spending rules improve social welfare? We analyze a dynamic political-economy model in which two parties disagree on the split of a fixed budget between public goods and private transfers. Under a mandatory spending rule, expenditures are governed by criteria set by enacted law,...

We study the effects of immigration on native welfare in a general equilibrium model featuring two skill types, search frictions, wage bargaining, and a redistributive welfare state. Our quantitative analysis suggests that, in all 20 countries studied, immigration attenuates the effects of...

We incorporate trade imbalances into a quantitative model of bilateral trade in manufactures, dividing the world into forty countries. Fitting the model to 2004 data on GDP and bilateral trade we calculate how relative wages, real wages, and welfare would differ in a counterfactual world with...