Employing data from a representative survey conducted in Germany, this paper examines public preferences for the size and composition of government expenditure. We focus on public attitudes toward taxes, public debt incurrence, and public spending in six different policy areas. Our findings...

We investigate the extent to which the intensity of political competition moderates the governance issues that arise in relation to Canada’s fiscal structure. By fiscal structure we mean three distinct but interrelated fiscal dimensions of the state: financial stability, long run size and...

I develop a political economy theory of dynamic fiscal competition via public spending and debt. With internationally mobile capital, strategic policies generate two cross-border externalities that voters in each country fail to internalize: (1) an increase in public spending that bolsters...

Austerity is a concept that is often used in the public debate. It refers to fiscal policy measures that reduce government spending and raise taxes for the purposes of closing a government budget deficit. This paper analyzes the concept in the context of the current European economic crisis and...

This article examines the problem of legislative entrenchment through a particular focus on federal fiscal policy. The conventional academic debate about legislative entrenchment centers on hard entrenchment, but hard entrenchment is highly improbable – perhaps simply impossible – under the...

Policymakers must do something to slow the growing debt burden or else face a major fiscal meltdown. Proposals such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal would only make the looming fiscal crisis worse

This paper will present the Modern Money Theory approach to government finance. In short, a national government that chooses its own money of account, imposes a tax in that money of account, and issues currency in that money of account cannot face a financial constraint. It can make all payments...

We apply non-linear error-correction models to the empirical testing of the sustainability of the government's intertemporal budget constraint. Our empirical analysis, based on Italy, shows that the Italian government is meeting its intertemporal budget constraint, in spite of the high levels of...

The study looks at primary expenditure developments in the euro area, its three largest members and four "macro-imbalances" countries for the period 1999-2009. It compares actual expenditure trends with those that would have prevailed if countries had followed neutral policies based on...