Distribution of fiscal income among municipalities - which are constitutionally federal official entities in Brazil - is highly unequal. Given conurbation processes and intense urbanization in the second half of the past century, some municipalities concentrate resources and quality public...

Public spending devolution in practice is widely seen as more appropriate for addressing varied political aspirations within state boundaries than is tax devolution. A drawback is that devolved public spending may be subject to irresistible upward pressure, as illustrated by 'formula drift' of...

This paper studies Ramsey-optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a New Keynesian 2-country open economy framework, which is used to assess how far fiscal policy can substitute for the role of nominal exchange rates within a monetary union. Giving up exchange rate flexibility leads to welfare...

The IFS Green Budget 2018, in association with Citi, ICAEW and the Nuffield Foundation, is edited by Carl Emmerson, Christine Farquharson and Paul Johnson, and copy-edited by Judith Payne. The report looks at the issues and challenges facing Chancellor Philip Hammond as he prepares for his...

With the unexpected onset of COVID-19, governments across the world responded with a range of preventive measures, including the imposition of lockdowns. To mitigate the adverse effects of lockdowns arising from supply chain shocks and employment loss, governments worldwide chose to implement...

The Great Depression in Germany led to the radicalization of the electorate, leading the country and then the world into the darkest days of Western Civilization. Could it have been otherwise? This paper explores whether the NSDAP takeover might have been averted with a fiscal policy that...

This paper explores the potential effectiveness of the ECB s Outright Monetary Transaction (OMT) program in safeguarding an appropriate monetary policy transmission. Since the program aims at manipulating bank lending rates by conducting sovereign bond purchases on secondary markets, a stable...