We study the sustainability of pension systems using a life-cycle model with distortionary taxation that sets an upper limit to the real value of tax revenues. This limit implies an endogenous threshold dependency ratio, i.e. a point in the cross-section distribution of the population beyond...

Empirical evidence suggests that the Effective Marginal Tax Rate (EMTR) on income from capital has increased considerably in both the United States and the United Kingdom over the period 1982-2005. This evidence contradicts the corporate tax literature which predicts that the EMTR should instead...

This paper studies optimal macroeconomic policy when nonlinearity in the business cycle is described by a vector smooth transition autoregression (VSTAR). A structural identification of the VSTAR that yields a low-dimension and certainty-equivalent nonlinear quadratic regulator (NLQR) problem is...

We develop a regime switching vector autoregression where artificial neural networks drive time variation in the coefficients of the conditional mean of the endogenous variables and the variance covariance matrix of the disturbances. The model is equipped with a stability constraint to ensure...

Using an overlapping generations model, two new indicators of public pension system sustainability are proposed: the pension space, which measures the capacity to pay for pension expenditures out of labour taxation, and the pension space exhaustion probability reflecting demographic...

We study an individual's incentive to search for a job in the presence of random criminal opportunities. These opportunities extenuate moral hazard, as the individual sometimes commits crime rather than searching. Even when he searches, he applies less effort. We then revisit the design of...

This paper investigates the incentives that may induce workers to supplement income from unemployment benefits by engaging in temporary informal work. Using a dynamic model of job-search with moral hazard that incorporates a stylised schedule of benefit payments, we describe how informal sector...

The accounting and economic literature have long highlighted the potential implications of deferred taxation for tax policy analysis. This paper incorporates deferred taxation into the neoclassical investment model for the computation of the Effective Tax Rate (ETR) on business investment and...

This paper explores the implications of time varying volatility for optimal monetary policy and the measurement of welfare costs. We show how macro-economic models with linear and quadratic state dependence in their variance structure can be used for the analysis of optimal policy within the...

Empirical evidence suggests that the Effective Marginal Tax Rate (EMTR) on income from capital has increased considerably in both the United States and the United Kingdom over the period 1982-2005. This evidence contradicts the corporate tax literature which predicts that the EMTR should instead...