The costs of wars have been the main driver of public debt in the Western World during the modern era. The late twentieth century stands out as a period that saw a pronounced increase of government debt to GDP ratios in peacetime. This paper assesses the role that financial crises have played in...

In the first era of financial globalization (1880-1914), global capital market integration led to substantial net capital movements from rich to poor economies. The historical experience stands in contrast to the contemporary globalization where gross capital mobility is equally high, but did...

In this paper we study the macroeconomic effects of large exchange rate appreciations. Using a sample of 128 countries from 1960-2008, we identify large nominal and real appreciations shocks and study their macroeconomic effects in a dummy-augmented panel autoregressive model. Our results show...

An unduly neglected implication of the choice of the tax unit is its impact on the consumption risk carried by taxpayers. As compared to individual taxation, joint taxation with income splitting provides couples with more insurance against the risk of earning inability for one of the spouses. If...

Fixed-term contracts are often considered a key policy tool for increasing employment. As we show that contract limitation lowers job satisfaction using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel study, we detect a drawback of promoting temporary employment that has not been identified so far. We...

Generous income support programs as provided by European welfare states have often been blamed to reduce work incentives for lower income classes and to increase durations of unemployment. Standard studies measure work incentives based on annual income concepts. This paper analyzes how work...

Tax competition for the mobile factor capital has led to a trend in many countries to levy lower taxes on interest income, often introducing differential taxation between interest and business income. In this study, we analyze the effect of such differential taxation on the debt ratio of firms....

In a real-effort laboratory experiment to manipulate evasion opportunities, we study whether the moral evaluation of tax evasion is subject to a self-serving bias. We find that tax morale is egoistically biased: Subjects with the opportunity to evade taxes judge tax evasion as less unethical as...

We examine the effects of increased international integration of both goods and financial markets on business cycle dynamics. To do so, we develop a new econometric framework for modelling cross-country spillovers in which the magnitude of these spillovers is an empirically determined function...