The Obama stimulus package has been less than a total success if one is to compare what was predicted to what has been delivered to date. The crux of the problem is that the economic planners have ignored or failed to take into account the secondary effects that increased government spending has...

In this paper we investigate the real effects of fiscal policy in Brazil during the 1995-2008 period by estimating a VAR model that explicitly takes into consideration the role of public debt in the determination of fiscal variables, as recommended by Favero and Giavazzi (2007). According to our...

The paper formalizes the relation between flat taxes and growth when there is a competitive equilibrium tax evasion. A decentralized tax evasion service is supplied by the banking sector. The bank production function follows the financial intermediation microfoundation approach, with deposits as...

The paper presents an endogenous growth economy with a representation of the tax rate system in the Baltic countries. Assuming that government spending is a given fraction of output, the papershows how a flat tax system balanced between labor and corporate tax rates can be second best optimal....

Recently, the world economy has seen its greatest down turn since World War II. Although not as bad as during the Great Depression, there was still a worrisome increase in protectionist measures, in an attempt to mitigate the economic downturn. Protectionism can have many different faces. It can...

One of the key decisions that economists working on integrated studies of climate change face is the selection of the method of accounting for damages resulting from possible climate change across a long temporal scale and the method for the intertemporal comparison of the costs associated with...

There is much debate about the usefulness of the neoclassical growth model for assessing the macroeconomic impact of fiscal shocks. We test the theory using data from World War II, which is by far the largest fiscal shock in the history of the United States. We take observed changes in fiscal...

This book examines new classical macroeconomics from a comparative and critical point of view that confronts the original texts and later comments as a first dimension of comparison. The second dimension appears in a historical context, since none of the new classical doctrines can be analyzed...

We develop a two-region Susceptible-Infected-Recovered-Macroeconomic model to evaluate the cooperative and non-cooperative cross-border travel arrangements during a pandemic. In a symmetric setting, the Pareto optimal is a cooperative travel arrangement that emphasizes exclusively on domestic...

The point of departure for the study of the impact of energy and environmental policies is the neoclassical theory of economic growth formulated by Cass (1965) and Koopmans (1967). The long-run properties of economic growth models are independent of energy and environmental policies. However,...