It is well known by now that government spending has typically been procyclical in developing economies but acyclical or countercyclical in industrial countries. Little, if any, is known, however, about the cyclical behavior of tax rates (as opposed to tax revenues, which are endogenous to the...

Informal payments are a frequently overlooked source of local public finance in developing countries. We use microdata from ten countries to establish stylized facts on the magnitude, form, and distributional implications of this "informal taxation." Informal taxation is widespread, particularly...

This paper analyzes the effect of and performance of foreign direct investment (FDI). sparing foreign investment income to permit investors to receive the full benefits of host country tax reductions. For example, Japanese firms investing in countries with whom Japan has agreements are entitled...

This paper presents a simple two-country model of the role of taxation in capital flows between developed countries ("The North") and developing countries ("The South"). The Southern country is assumed to be unable to enforce a tax on its residents' foreign-source income, and the Northern...

To explain the fact that government spending and tax policy are procyclical in emerging and developing countries, we develop a model for the joint behavior of optimal tax rates and government spending over the business cycle. Our set-up relies on financial frictions, which have been shown to be...

We trace the linkages between the episodes of fiscal expansion and consolidation in 72 advanced and emerging and developing economies. The findings suggest that fiscal expansions are positively associated with economic growth, which in turn is positively linked with better sustainable...

Emerging countries exhibit volatile fiscal policies and frequent sovereign debt crises, that significantly diminish the well-being of their citizens. International advisors typically suggest developed-world solutions as a remedy. We argue that the root of the problem lies in the institutional...

The real economic cost of homeownership depends on an intricate system of taxes and subsides that vary over time and across the United States. We incorporate the key features of this system into a framework for measuring the annual user-cost of housing and we use it to document how housing costs...

By preemptive austerity, we mean a policy that increases taxes to deter potential rollover crises. The policy is so successful that the usual danger signal of a rollover crisis, a high yield on new bonds sold, does not show up because the policy eliminates the danger. Mechanically, high taxes...

This paper proposes a new framework to study the distribution of taxes and the effects of tax reforms, connecting classical tax incidence analysis to optimal tax theory. To study the distribution of current taxes, labor taxes are assigned to the corresponding workers, capital taxes to the...