The Structural Vector Auto-regression (SVAR) approach to estimating fiscal multipliers, following the seminal paper by Blanchard and Perotti (2002), has been widely applied in the literature. In our pa-per we discuss the interpretation of these estimates and suggest that they are more useful for...

The Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) made significant changes to corporate and personal federal income taxation, including limiting the SALT (state and local property, income and sales taxes) deductibility to $10,000. States with high SALT tend to vote Democratic. This paper estimates the...

Daycares closed on March 16, 2020 in Turkey to prevent the spread of COVID-19. At the same time, the two most common nonparental childcare arrangements in Turkey-care of children by grandparents and nannies-became undesirable due to health concerns and in some cases also unfeasible due to the...

In the wake of violent conflict, a key element of building a durable peace is building a state with the ability to collect and manage public resources. To implement peace accords and provide public services, the government must be able to collect revenue, allocate resources, and manage...

Every year over 20 states offer sales tax holidays (STHs) on specific items like clothes, shoes and other items to encourage consumption, effecting over 100 million consumers. We use a unique dataset of credit cards transaction to study the spending response to these holidays. Using a...

Economists have studied many aspects of tax evasion. The vast literature has concentrated on the individual taxpayer’s decision on avoiding taxes by underreporting income. However no comprehensive investigation of the individual taxpayer’s decision on claiming unjustified subsidies (e. g. by...

Does the supply of a welfare state create its own demand? Many economic scholars studying welfare arrangements refer to Say's law and insinuate a self-destructive welfare state. However, little is known about the empirical validity of these assumptions and hypotheses. We study the dynamic effect...

Previous research on optimal R&D subsidies has focussed on the long run. This paper characterizes the optimal time path of R&D subsidization in a semi-endogenous growth model, by exploiting a recently developed numerical method. Starting from the steady state under current R&D subsidization in...

This paper shows that dynamic inefficiency can occur in dynamic general equilibrium models with fully optimizing, infinitely-lived households even in a situation with underinvestment. We identify necessary conditions for such a possibility and illustrate it in a standard R&D-based growth model....

The paper examines the effects of an environmental tax reform in a model of a small open economy with decentralised wage bargaining and monopolistically competitive firms. The economy includes a tradable sector as well as a non-tradable sector and features unemployment in general equilibrium....