According to Kim and Lee (1997), property taxes as opposed to capital gain taxes and taxes on rent endanger dynamic efficiency. The present paper shows that the choice of the tax base is immaterial. What counts is whether the taxes eliminate the after-tax rent. Empirical evidence suggests that...

Government debt and redistributive taxation can help people to smooth consumption when facing uninsurable individual specific risk. I examine the effects that variations in public debt and transfers have on risk sharing, efficiency, and the distribution of resources. I find that risk sharing can...

This paper investigates methods of assessing dynamic efficiency, points out their shortcomings and develops a new criterion of determining whether or not an economy accumulates too much capital. This criterion is then applied to the OECD countries as well as China. The analysis sheds a new light...

In this paper, we study the intertemporal equilibria of an infinite-lived representative agent model with public debt. We show that for a given path of government expenditures, there generally exist a continuum of equilibria depending on various debt policies.

This paper formalizes the link among electoral uncertainty, fiscal policy and economic growth. The setup is a dynamic general equilibrium model of optimal growth and fiscal policy, in which fiscal policy is endogenized through a game between two political parties that can alternate in power.

This paper formalizes the link among electoral uncertainty, fiscal policy and economic growth. The setup is a dynamic general equilibrium model of optimal growth and fiscal policy, in which fiscal policy is endogenized through a game between two political parties that can alternate in power.

We show that (i) dynamic inefficiency may be empirically relevant in a modified Diamond model with imperfect competition, (ii) if fiscal policy is used to avoid inefficiency and maintain an optimal capital intensity, the required debt ratio will be inversely related to the growth rate, and (iii)...

In the coming decades, the share of people in working age will fall significantly in most developed countries. According to optimal taxation theory, public debts should be reduced before the baby-boom generation retires. I find that if debts are instead maintained at the current levels, welfare...

Modern financial repression in advanced economies does not rely on increasing seigniorage revenue, but mostly rests upon regulatory measures to enlarge the demand for public debt that delivers extremely low or negative real interest rate. In this paper we propose the extension of the overlapping...