This paper examines the role of tax policy reforms in enhancing fiscal shock smoothing in a panel of 13 OECD economies during the period 1980-2017. The results suggest that tax reforms, in particular those that broaden the tax base, significantly enhance the ability of fiscal policy to mitigate...

Recent evidence on the impact of fiscal policy – taxes, public expenditures and budget deficits – on long-run growth in OECD countries has adopted the Barro (1990) framework to distinguish between ‘productive' and ‘unproductive' expenditures, and ‘distortionary' and...

As the COVID-19 pandemic has shaped public policies and government finances, it has also influenced the topics that public finance economists are researching. Because the 2020 International Institute of Public Finance (IIPF) Congress featured papers that were submitted prior to the start of the...

Recent evidence on the impact of fiscal policy – taxes, public expenditures and budget deficits – on long-run growth in OECD countries has adopted the Barro (1990) framework to distinguish between ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ expenditures, and ‘distortionary’ and...

We study state-dependent effects of narratively identified tax shocks in Germany and the UK over the period 1974Q1-2018Q4 using local projections. In addition, we distinguish between aggregated and disaggregated tax types (direct and indirect taxes) as well as look for possible asymmetries...

This paper quantifies the dynamic macroeconomic effects of tax changes in Germany, allowing for anticipation effects of preannounced tax reforms. Identification is achieved using a narrative approach which provides information about the timing of tax reforms. For an anticipated tax shock, we...

This paper investigates the response of major macroeconomic variables to four different types of tax policy innovations in Canada within a VAR framework. The positive tax multipliers documented in the previous literature are found only for corporate tax innovations. Our results imply that...

To finance basic pro-poor services, the Government of Ghana must mobilize more public revenue. But tax reform has been highly controversial in Ghana. An attempt to introduce VAT in 1995 failed after widespread protests. Although a second attempt to introduce VAT in 1998 succeeded, strong...

Cloyne (2013) constructs a novel dataset documenting fiscal tax shocks in the United Kingdom using the narrative approach developed by Romer and Romer (2010), and estimates the impact of tax changes on GDP. He finds that a tax cut of one percent of GDP causes a 0.6 percent increase in output in...