This paper provides a simple, yet general framework to analyze the optimal time profile of benefits during the unemployment spell. We derive simple sufficient-statistics formulae capturing the insurance value and incentive costs of unemployment benefits paid at different times during the...

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....

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....

In November 2005, the Hungarian government frontloaded the unemployment benefit path, while kept constant the total benefit amount that could be collected over the unemployment spell. We estimate the effect of this reform on non-employment duration using an interrupted time series design. We...

This paper studies regional output asymmetries following U.S. federal tax shocks. We estimate a vector autoregressive model for each U.S. state, utilizing the exogenous tax shock series recently proposed by Romer and Romer (2010) and find considerable variations: estimated output multipliers lie...

This paper presents a historical account of legislated tax changes in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1964 to 2010, thus establishing a database appropriate for the macroeconometric analysis of the fiscal policy transmission mechanism. Ninety-five quantitatively important pieces of tax...

This paper calculates effective macro-economic tax rates for the 25 EU countries following the methodology developed in Mendoza, Razin, and Tesar (1994). The available Eurostat data allow to compute the tax wedge on consumption, labor and capital. We show that effective tax rates in the 10 new...

This paper develops a medium-scale dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium (DSGE) model for fiscal policy simulations. Relative to existingmodels of this type, our model incorporates a two-country monetary union structure, which makes it well suited to simulate fiscal measures by relatively...

This paper reviews the existing evidence on the effects of tax reforms on output levels and growth over the short and long run from different strands of the literature. It develops and applies criteria to evaluate the usefulness of ex-post estimates to predict the effects of tax reforms ex-ante....

We quantify the fiscal multipliers in response to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. We extend the benchmark Smets-Wouters (Smets and Wouters, 2007) New Keynesian model, allowing for credit-constrained households, the zero lower bound, government capital and distortionary...