A recent literature has emerged providing compelling evidence that a major shift in the organization of the developed economies has been taking place: away from what has been characterized as the managed economy towards the entrepreneurial economy. In particular, the empirical evidence provides...

Estimating the response of hours worked to technology shocks is often considered as a crucial step for evaluating the applicability of macroeconomic models to reality. In particular, Galí [1999] has considered the conditional correlation between employment and productivity as a key tool for...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the origins of a critical process in the North American economy before the subprime crisis, namely, the increasing debt of households. It is argued that causes of this indebtedness are alterations in income distribution (an increased concentration of...

In this paper we investigate the macroeconomic and welfare effects of recent proposals to reduce the tax burden on the production sector in Brazil. We evaluate two specific policy measures: a) the replacement of social security taxes with a consumption tax; and b) the provision of tax incentives...

This article investigates the effects of fiscal policy shock in the Brazilian economy using quarterly data during the period between January/1995 and December/2007. We follow the agnostic procedure suggested by Mountford and Uhlig (2005) to verify separately the impact of the unexpected positive...

This paper aims to contribute to the debate on the best way to reduce the tax burden on the production sector in Brazil, by simulating an overlapping generations model calibrated to the country's economy. Our focus is on the comparison of the macroeconomic and welfare impacts brought about by...

While there is a fairly broad consensus regarding the potential adverse effects of generous unemployment benefit insurance on steady-state employment, the short-term effects of benefit reforms are not well-established. This paper contributes to fill this gap by estimating impulse responses to...

In this paper, we present data on recent trends in private consumption and in possible determinants of private consumption (such as GDP, household incomes, household saving rates, household wealth, and employment conditions) in the Group of Seven (G7) countries and find that there has been...

This paper evaluates the effects for the Spanish case of allowing greater flexibility regarding the weekly hours worked on the working week, employment and productivity. A baseline model economy is calibrated to reproduce the cross-sectional distribution of workweeks across plants, as well as...

The worst global downturn since the Great Depression has caused ballooning budget deficits in most nations, as tax revenues collapse and governments bail out financial institutions and attempt countercyclical fiscal policy. With notable exceptions, most economists accept the desirability of...