In the transitional phase towards full economic integration, European countries have the possibility of re-shaping the continental geography of specialization. We develop a two-sector two-country model that shows formally how fiscal policy can be critical in promoting specialization in a phase...

Feldstein (1997) reviews his and others' contributions in the distortionary costs of taxation, arriving at a remarkable estimate that the cost per incremental dollar of government spending is a very high $2.65. Kaplow (1996) argues that it is optimal to supply a public good whenever the...

This paper analyzes optimal pre-announced capital and labor income tax reforms under valuable and productive government spending. Our baseline optimal reform reveals that these model ingredients result in a reduction of welfare losses that occur when the reform is announced before its...

Feldstein (1997) reviews his and others' contributions in the distortionary costs of taxation, arriving at a remarkable estimate that the cost per incremental dollar of government spending is a very high $2.65. Kaplow (1996) argues that it is optimal to supply a public good whenever the...

This paper evaluates the trade-off between growth and welfare maximization from two perspectives. Firstly, it synthesizes and ex- tends endogenous growth models with public finance to compare growth and welfare maximizing tax rates. Secondly, it examines the distinct model outcomes in terms of...

We derive the optimal fiscal policy for a government that is committed to honoring its debt but faces investors which fear a sovereign default. We assume that investors are able to learn from new evidence, as in Marcet and Sargent (1989), so that they can gradually correct their overly...

We reexamine the properties of optimal fiscal policy and their implications for implementable capital accumulation. The setup is a standard endogenous growth model with public production services, augmented by elastic labor supply. We show that, when a benevolent government chooses a distorting...

Changes in tax policy can affect all aspects of the economy. Not only do firms and individuals change behavior, creating efficiency costs, but government expenditure choices can also change. Unless these expenditure choices had been optimal' previously, changes in response to a tax reform affect...