This paper analyzes the implications of a cost of deviating upwards from a public-debt/output guideline, as the 0.6 ratio in the Maastricht Treaty, in the context of a fiscal policymaking model. Given a pre-announced timetable for enforcement, the dynamic paths of the tax rate and government...

An empirical investigation of fiscal effects on saving is carried out with Israeli data, which disply large variability in both the saving rate and the fiscal variables.

This paper studies the role of business cycles in the phenomenon of increasing government spending/GDP ratios in the OECD countries. Using a panel data set covering the 1975-1995 period, the main finding is that the prolonged rise in this ratio is linked to a cyclical bias; the spending/GDP...

The effects of equipment investment on relative wages and employment of skilled labor are estimated. The basic hypothesis is that such effecst are positive, due to the presence of either equipment-skill complementarity or skill advantage in technology adoption. Using a panel data set for a wide...

The paper studies the effects of mass immigration from the former USSR to Israel in the 1990s on the employment of the native-born. The exogeneity and the size of this inflow make it a "natural experiment'' of macroeconomic proportions. An open-economy model is used to analyze this experience,...