This paper investigates how tax rates and tax enforcement jointly impact fiscal capacity in low-income countries. We study a policy experiment in the D.R. Congo that randomly assigned 38,028 property owners to the status quo tax rate or to a rate reduction. This variation in tax liabilities...

German municipalities levy local business taxes by choosing a tax rate to apply to local business income, where the tax base is defined uniformly at the national level. Before the federal government's imposition of a minimum tax rate in 2004, some municipalities such as the tiny North Sea town...

Using the society-managed health insurance data, which is cross-sectional time-series and covers 1,670 health insurance societies for seven years (FY1995-2001), we found for the first time in Japan that the majority of the employer's contribution to health insurance is shifting back onto the...

Firms that are more highly levered are forced to raise capital more often, a process that generates information about them. Of course transparency can improve the allocation of capital. However, when the information about the firm affects the terms under which the firm transacts with its...

This paper uses a sample of 116 recession episodes in developed and emerging market economies to compare the labor-market recovery during financial crises with that of other recession episodes. It documents two new stylized facts. First, labor-market recovery from financial crises is...

This paper analyzes the relation between public wage bills and public deficits in the OECD countries from 1995 to 2009. The paper shows that fiscal drift episodes, characterized by simultaneous increases in the GDP shares of public wage bills and budget deficits, are more frequent during booms...

We propose a new measure of allocative efficiency based on unrealized increases in aggregate productivity growth. We show that the difference in the value of the marginal product of an input and its marginal cost at any plant - the plant-input "gap" - is exactly equal to the change in aggregate...

This paper explores the combined effects of reductions in trade frictions, tariffs, and firing costs on firm dynamics, job turnover, and wage distributions. It uses establishment-level data from Colombia to estimate an open economy dynamic model that links trade to job flows in a new way. The...

In search and bargaining models, the effect of higher wages on employment is determined by the elasticity of the job creation curve. In this paper, we use U.S. data over the 1970-2007 period to explore whether labor market outcomes abide by the restrictions implied by such models and to evaluate...

European nations substitute between employment protection regulations and labor market expenditures (e.g., unemployment insurance benefits) for providing worker insurance. Employment regulations more directly tax firms making frequent labor adjustments than other labor insurance mechanisms....