During economic crises, governments often increase fiscal spending to stimulate the economy. While the fiscal spending surge may be temporary, spending composition is often altered in favor of expenditures on social programs and other public goods which may persist over time. We model and...

This paper combines elasticities from microstudies with estimates from a cross-country analysis to identify structural relationships explaining deforestation in Brazil, Indonesia,Malaysia, and the Philippines. Economy-wide factors such as trade openness and economic growth explain an important...

This paper examines the effects of public provision of private goods (i.e., non-social government subsidies) to the detriment of government provision of public goods and social subsidies on two key measures of the quality of economic growth: poverty rates and income inequality. We use a new data...

This essay explains the emergence of government failure within an economy and links this type of government failure with market failure. The current framework used to analyze the link between fiscal policy choice and sustainable growth patterns is incomplete in at least two ways. First, previous...