The recent recession has brought fiscal policy back to the forefront, with economists and policy makers struggling to reach a consensus on highly political issues like tax rates and government spending. At the heart of the debate are fiscal multipliers, whose size and sensitivity determine the...

Intro -- Preface -- Introduction -- 1 Europe and the United States: Two Different Social Models -- 2 Handling a Multiethnic Society -- 3 Americans at Work, Europeans on Holiday -- 4 Job Security, Job Regulations, and 14 Million Unemployed -- 5 Technology, Research, and Universities -- 6...

Is the federal budget deficit a result of congressional deadlocks, gross miscalculation of economic trends, or a Republican strategy to tie the budgetary hands of future Democratic leadership? To what extend does the partisan split between Congress and the executive branch constrain the...

This book brings together a diverse group of experts on international monetary policy to examine the basic conceptual issues of currency unions and other monetary regimes, including flexible and fixed exchange rates, and assess the available empirical evidence on the performance of these...

This paper examines the regional distribution of public employment in Italy and documents two sets of facts. The first is the use of public employment as a subsidy from the North to the less wealthy South. We calculate that about half of the wage bill in the South of Italy can be identified as a...

Gender Based Taxation (GBT) satisfies Ramsey's optimal criterion by taxing less the more elastic labor supply of (married) women. This holds when different elasticities between men and women are taken as exogenous and primitive. But in this paper we also explore differences in gender...