How much additional tax revenue can the government generate by increasing labor income taxes? In this paper we provide a quantitative answer to this question, and study the importance of the progressivity of the tax schedule for the ability of the government to generate tax revenues. We develop...

We propose and apply a new approach for analyzing the effects of fiscal policy using vector autoregressions. Unlike most of the previous literature this approach does not require that the contemporaneous reaction of some variables to fiscal policy shocks be set to zero or need additional...

We propose and apply a new approach for analyzing the effects of fiscal policy using vector autoregressions. Unlike most of the previous literature this approach does not require that the contemporaneous reaction of some variables to fiscal policy shocks be set to zero or need additional...

In August 2009 the Congressional Budget Offi ce warned that the budget was on an unsustainable path. Preventing federal debt from growing faster than the economy over the long-run requires large increases in revenues and/or decreases in spending. We explore, using the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy...

The United States faces two economic challenges: slow growth and an ever-increasing ratio of debt to GDP. Many policymakers believe they face a dilemma because the policy solutions to the two problems are opposite. To address the slow recovery, standard — Keynesian — economics suggests...

In August 2009 the Congressional Budget Offi ce warned that the budget was on an unsustainable path. Preventing federal debt from growing faster than the economy over the long-run requires large increases in revenues and/or decreases in spending. We explore, using the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy...

This paper investigates the effect of tax credit receipt on the outstanding indebtedness of households. In particular, we use data on zip code level indebtedness to explore whether debt levels and past due amounts change more dramatically during tax refund season in those zip codes where...

This paper provides a characterization of the fiscal policy framework in four established federal countries with heterogeneous intergovernmental relations and demographic characteristics: Canada, Germany, Switzerland and the United States. We consider the implications of fiscal federalism from...

The euro area is facing crisis, while the US is not, though the overall fiscal situation and outlook is better in the euro area than in the US, and though the US faces serious state-level fiscal crises. A higher level of fiscal federalism would strengthen the euro area, but is not inevitable....

A fiscal shock due to a shift in taxes or in government spending will, at some point in time, constrain the future path of taxes and spending, since the government's intertemporal budget constraint will eventually have to be met. This simple fact is surprisingly overlooked in analyses of the...