Despite sustained efforts made in recent years to rein in budget deficits, a majority of OECD countries still face substantial public finance consolidation needs moving forward, owing to the legacy of debt accumulation before the crisis, and to the role played by fiscal policy in rescuing the...

Despite sustained efforts made in recent years to rein in budget deficits, a majority of OECD countries still face substantial fiscal consolidation needs. The choices made about which spending areas to curtail and which taxes to hike will have implications for near-term activity and long-term...

This paper examines the distributional consequences of public debt reduction achieved through spending cuts. Under the assumption that public goods and transfers are relatively more valuable to the poor, our calculations indicate that the elderly poor stand to lose from such policies. Debt...

This paper studies the impact of income inequality on sovereign spreads under elastic labor and endogenous taxation. We first document that high pre-tax income inequality is associated with high spreads both across countries and across U.S. states. We then develop a sovereign default model with...

Most party systems have seen a considerable rise in polarization during the past decades. We show that fiscal policies have contributed to this development. Our macro-level analysis of 166 elections since 1980 finds that austerity increases both electoral abstention and votes for non-mainstream...

Despite sustained efforts made in recent years to rein in budget deficits, a majority of OECD countries still face substantial fiscal consolidation needs. The choices made about which spending areas to curtail and which taxes to hike will have implications for near-term activity and long-term...

Despite sustained efforts made in recent years to rein in budget deficits, a majority of OECD countries still face substantial public finance consolidation needs. While essential to avoid the disruption and large costs ultimately associated with unsustainable public finances, fiscal...

After the 2009 global recession, many papers identified a non-linear inverted U-shaped relationship between economic growth and sovereign debt. However, their results are mixed regarding the exact turning point and, recently, the direction of its causality. According the traditional view, we...

This paper studies the (Ramsey) optimal taxation of labor income when wage inequality is rising, as has been the case in many developed economies in recent decades. The tax schedule is a linear or affine function of labor income every period. Workers are ax-ante heterogenous in their initial...

Rising income inequality has emerged as a major policy issue facing policymakers, but there is a dearth of empirical work on inequality in small states, including the Caribbean. Despite data limitations, the empirical analysis using a sample of small states finds that increased openness and...