« Social freedom » and the respect of corresponding rights, as well as Pareto efficiency (a priori required by democracy), imply that taxes and subsidies (re)distributing income are based on given « natural resources », the main of which ?'by very far?' consists of individuals?' productive...

This paper provides empirical evidence of the heterogeneous borrowing behaviours of French regions, despite a common accountability constraint that forces them to balance their budget and to borrow only to finance investment expenditure (golden rule). To this end, we conduct a quantile...

This preliminary note aims to detect the empirical factors of the spatial repartition of the 2008 French governmental macroeconomic plan. The econometric analysis shows i. the lack of political determinants inducing the default of pork-barreling strategy; ii. the incoherent influence of the...

We propose a simple theoretical model showing the existence of non-linear effects of fiscal deficits on economic growth, depending on the public debt to gdp ratio. For low debt values, raising deficit is growth increasing, as the debt burden raise may be absorbed by a decrease in government...

It is often argued that implicit taxation on continued activity of elderly workers is responsible for the widely observed trend towards early retirement. In a first best world, it is certainly possible to eliminate this taxation and have a social security scheme that is redistributive and...

Generational accounting, initiated in the early 90?s, intends to take the government long term financial liabilities into account. Indeed, these are not included in the standard measure of the budget deficit. Our calculations, using this technique, indicate that French generational policy is...

This paper analyses the risk of default on public debt within a repeated game between the governement and private investors. The government has only an imperfect control over the stream of future revenues. In this case, a long sequence of adverse budgetary shocks may push the debt over its...

In this paper, we look for long-run and short-run effects of fiscal deficits on economic growth and welfare in a standard endogenous growth model. We show that, under very general hypotheses, the Golden Rule of Public Finance?, which allows a government to run a deficit if this deficit is...