In this paper, we quantitatively analyze to what extent a benevolent government should issue debt in a model where households are subject to idiosyncratic productivity shocks, insurance markets are missing and borrowing is restricted. In this environment, issuing government bonds facilitates...

This paper uses a heterogeneous-agent overlapping-generations model to examine the fiscal and distributional consequences of introducing a means test in US Social Security. I find that a means test, that is, conditioning benefit payments on a household's earnings or assets, leads to a higher...

I study the spill-over effects of legislated discretionary tax changes in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom to 11 Eurozone countries for the period 1980Q1-2018Q4 employing Local Projections (Jordà, 2005). In general, I find spillovers from US tax legislation to have the...

We study the announcement effect of legislated tax changes on GDP in the US, Germany, and the UK. Using, as the shock of interest, narratively identified information (Romer & Romer, 2009) about future tax changes at the quarter of their introduction to the legislative body, we analyse the...

Using a narrative account of quarterly discretionary changes in tax liabilities from 1974Q4 to 2018Q2 in a VAR setting, we study whether legislative tax changes affect the trade balance in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. As legislative tax changes we consider (i) all changes,...