We set up a probabilistic voting model to explore the hypothesis that tax competition improves public sector efficiency and social welfare. In the absence of tax base mobility, distortions in the political process induce vote-maximising politicians to create rents to public sector employees....

The paper provides an intuitive explanation - seen from an efficiency point of view - of the optimal commodity tax structure as the result of a trade-off between two objectives: 1) the objective of maintaining the first-best pattern of consumption of produced commodities, and 2) the objective of...

This paper studies the short-run transmission of foreign shocks in a small open economy with capital controls and a fixed exchange rate. Capital controls alter the transmission of shocks because endogenous changes in the domestic nominal interest rate affect savings and investment decisions. The...

This paper proposes a unifying framework for theories of capital tax competition, and surveys and synthesizes the literature within this framework. The synthesis covers various standard tax competition models, models allowing for leviathan governments and democratic elections, in addition more...

Semi-endogenous models and, to some extent, also Schumpeterian models are based on the assumption of diminishing returns to R&D. This paper shows that the null hypothesis of constant returns to R&D cannot be rejected for the OECD countries.

This paper sets up a dynamic general equilibrium model to study how the composition of technical progress affects the asymptotic speed of convergence. The following questions are addressed: Will endogenizing a fraction of the productivity increases as coming from learning by investing help to...

This paper revisits the currency crises model of Aghion, Bacchetta and Banerjee (2000, 2001, 2004), who show that if there exist nominal price rigidities and private sector credit constraints, and the credit multiplier depends on real interest rates, then the optimal monetary policy response to...

Corporate tax systems generally maintain a sharp distinction between debt and equity, however, the advent of hybrid instruments has transformed the universe offinancial instruments into a debt-equity continuum and tax systems therefore need to draw lines that distinguish the set of debt...