After a brief introduction dealing with critical opinions of some economists on the European austerity policy, the authors point out that austerity as a means of achieving fiscal consolidation and financial stability is applied when the fiscal domain is weak. After analyzing the effects of the...

We study the design of public long-term care (LTC) insurance when the altruism of informal caregivers is uncertain. We consider non-linear policies where the LTC benefit depends on the level of informal care, which is assumed to be observable while children's altruism is not. The traditional...

This article reviews the empirical literature on the impact of the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) on different welfare outcomes of rural households in Ethiopia. The main finding of the review is that the PSNP had in general positive impacts on some attributes. PSNP has been found to have...

The principal objective of this study is to test whether public expenditures on education, health and other development activities have been effective in reducing poverty in India. To ensure sensitivity and robustness of the results, three different measures of poverty belonging to the...

In the aftermath of the Asian financial crises, the Indonesian government launched a subsidized rice program called RASKIN in 1998 to moderate the shocks of food price inflation and reduced employment to poor households. The program has been continued since then with an objective to provide food...

The microsimulation model MOSART is used to analyse the long run development in disability and old-age pensions covered by the Norwegian National Insurance System. The number of pensioners will increase relative to the number of workers, leading to a growing tax burden on future generations. It...

Recent studies have claimed that states with initiatives systems of legislation use this more direct from of democracy to improve productive resource allocation. This paper compares the economic performance of states with initiatives to states that do not have initiatives. We first construct a...

This paper develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to examine the quantitative macroeconomic implications of countercyclical fiscal policy for France, Germany and the UK. The model incorporates real wage rigidity which is the particular market failure justifying policy...

This is the first study that assesses the economic effects of direct democratic institutions on a cross country basis. Its results are based on up to six new measures produced to reflect the legislative basis for using direct democratic institutions as well as their factual use. In addition, a...

Should a redistributive government optimally subsidize education to provoke a reduction in the skill premium through general equilibrium effects on wages? To answer this question, this paper studies optimal linear and non-linear redistributive income taxes and education subsidies in two-type...