High and unsustainable public debt is an economic problem at the center of many emerging and developing economies. This paper investigates, for the period 1978-2017, how the Surinamese Government reacted to changes in public debt for the period 1978-2017 and assesses if fiscal policy was...

This paper provides new evidence on the effect of debt on economic growth through two alternative methodological approaches. On the one hand, by using a panel error correction model with a sample of 130 countries between 1980 and 2020, we found evidence of the existence of a range of debt-to-GDP...

This paper uses state-level data to estimate the effect of federal defense spending shocks on state real activity. We find moderately strong evidence that for the average state the fiscal multiplier is larger during recessions. However, there is substantial heterogeneity across the...

This paper analyses the link between discretionary fiscal policy and interest-growth differentials (r-g). Panel regressions based on a dataset for 20 advanced countries over the years 1990-2019 reveal no evidence of a systematic linear relationship between fiscal policy and r-g. However, more...

We analyze the impact of elected competitors from the same constituency on legislative shirking in the German Bundestag from 1953 to 2017. The German electoral system ensures that there is always at least one federal legislator per constituency with a varying number of elected competitors from...

This paper provides evidence of bounded rationality by large dealers in U.S. Treasury auctions. I argue that these dealers use a heuristic of yield-space bidding which leads to biases manifested in three ways: they submit dominated bids, i.e., those that could be improved without raising the...

In this paper we investigate the effect of family connections to politicians on individuals' labor market outcomes. We combine data for Italy over almost three decades from longitudinal social security records on a random sample of around 1 million private sector employees with the universe of...

According to an influential theoretical argument, presidential systems tend to present smaller governments because the separation between those who decide the size of the fiscal purse and those who allocate it creates incentives for lower public expenditures. In practice, forms of government...

We propose a method to decompose changes in the tax structure into a component measuring the level of taxes and a component orthogonal to the level that measures progressivity. While our focus is on the progessivity results, we find that the level shock is similar to standard tax shocks found in...