The question of fiscal sustainability of countries has become one of the central topics in economic policy, especially in times of increasing public debts. One way to assess fiscal sustainability is to examine compliance with the intertemporal budget constraint, which involves testing the...

This Article explores the relationship between taxes and inter-generational equity. At the outset, Part I of the Article provides an overview of sustainable inter-generational justice and tax policy. Part II then provides an overview of the U.S. tax system, deficits, and public debt. Part III...

In this Article, I critically examine the assumption that the Social Security system faces a financing crisis and that the government can avert the crisis only by acting now to cut benefits or to raise taxes. The best conclusion we can draw from the current evidence is that the system is not...

The existing empirical literature on the US federal revenue-expenditure nexus has had mixed findings. Amongst those papers presenting evidence in favor of causation running from taxes to expenditures, support for the conventional, Friedman-type tax-spend hypothesis is nearly ubiquitous. Evidence...

Elected representatives have little incentive to pursue the interests of those electing them once they are elected. This well-known principle-agent problem leads, in a variety of theories of government, to non-optimally large levels of government expenditure. An implication is that budgetary...

In this study we argue that the U.S. should follow the Swiss precedent, restoring a strong fiscal federalist system, with fiscal autonomy for state and local governments. A ‘no-bailout' principle should be restored, such that state as well as local governments are subject to bankruptcy laws....

This paper discusses an alternative route to a balanced budget, namely through debt control. Two models are compared: the debt brake which has been used in Switzerland since 2003 and the debt limitation model proposed by Compact for America. The paper concludes that the former, while apparently...

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 explores the political economy of fiscal adjustment. It begins with an examination of the evidence for, and sources of, ‘deficit bias’, including political and governance factors, public attitudes, the role of financial markets and imprecision about which debt targets should be...

This paper develops a political-economy model of the budget process focusing on the common pool problem of the public budget. We show that the externality arising from the fact that public spending tends to be targeted at individual groups in society while the tax burden is widely dispersed...