This paper provides estimates of the government spending multiplier over the monetary policy cycle. We identify government spending shocks as forecast errors of the growth rate of government spending from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) and from the Greenbook record. The state of...

The Phillips curve is central to discussions of inflation dynamics and monetary policy. In particular, the New Keynesian Phillips Curve is a valuable tool to describe how past inflation, expected future inflation, and real marginal cost or an output gap drive the current inflation rate. However,...

This paper estimates the pass through of VAT changes to consumer prices, using a unique dataset providing disaggregated, monthly data on prices and VAT rates for 17 Eurozone countries over 1999-2013. Pass through is much less than full on average, and differs markedly across types of VAT change....

This paper examines the relative merits of two dominant economic instruments for reducing pollution—”green” taxes and tradable permits. Theoretically, the two instruments share many similarities, and on balance, neither seems preferable to the other. In practice, however, most countries...

In their effort to finance fiscal deficits at a reasonable cost, governments compete with other users of financial capital. Governments, however, are in the unique position that they are the only debt suppliers that can determine the taxation of debt instruments they issue. Following an overview...

The tax on immovable property has been characterized as probably the most unpopular among tax instruments, in part because it is salient and hard to avoid. But economists continue to emphasize the virtues of the property tax owing to its relatively low efficieny costs, benign impact on growth,...