The ownership nationality of large US multinational companies plays an implicit but important role in the current debate over how such companies should be taxed. This paper identifies that role and investigates what is actually known about where these companies’ shareholders reside

In recent years, an increasing number of countries have began anchoring their fiscal policy frameworks in terms of rules that target the cyclically adjusted or structural (as opposed to actual) balance in an effort to overcome problems of procyclicality and fiscal volatility. The logic for doing...

We build a tractable heterogeneous-agent incomplete-markets model with quasi-linear preferences to address a set of long-standing issues in the optimal Ramsey taxation literature. The tractability of our model enables us to analytically prove the existence of a Ramsey steady state and establish...

What is the prescription of Ramsey capital taxation in the long run? Aiyagari (1995) addressed the question in a heterogeneous-agent incomplete-markets (HAIM) economy, showing that a positive capital tax should be imposed to implement the so-called modified golden rule (MGR). This paper revisits...

We construct a dynamic general equilibrium model where agents use nominal government bonds as collateral in secured lending arrangements. If the collateral constraint binds, agents price in a liquidity premium on bonds that lowers the real rate on bonds. In equilibrium, the price level is...

This study analyzes the effects of "financial stress" on the Uruguayan macroeconomy in the 1998Q3-2016Q2 period with the underlying idea that financial shocks propagate differently during "normal times" than during times of "stress." This behavior is captured in a multivariate framework through...

This study contends that Caribbean countries cannot adequately surmount their fiscal and debt challenges in the absence of binding rules that are geared toward entrenching fiscal discipline, curbing fiscal procyclicality, and improving budget transparency and credibility. Distilling global...

This paper addresses a long-standing problem in the optimal Ramsey capital taxation literature. The tractability of our model enables us to solve the Ramsey problem analytically along the entire transitional path. We show that the conventional wisdom on Ramsey tax policy and its underlying...

Government-financed health care (GFHC) expenditures, through Medicare and Medicaid, have grown from roughly zero to over 7.6 percent of national personal income over the past 50 years. Recently, some analysts (e.g., the Council of Economics Advisers (2014)) have argued that an expansion of GFHC...

In this paper, we explore the proposition that the optimal capital income tax is zero using an overlapping generations model. We prove that for a large class of preferences, the optimal capital income tax along the transition path and in steady state is non-zero. For a version of the model...