Over the last decades, the United States has experienced a large increase in, both, income inequality and living standards. The workhorse models of optimal income taxation call for more redistribution as inequality rises. By contrast, living standards play no role for taxes and transfers in...

During the pandemic, public debt in Latin America and the Caribbean rose to more than 70 percent of GDP, and countries are now attempting to lower debt ratios. We analyze past debt reduction episodes and find inflation and the real interest rate were the most frequent main drivers, while higher...

This paper contributes to the still unresolved issue of the growth impact of government size by analysing a historical panel data set of 17 developed countries that ranges from 1880 to 2016. The unique feature of the long-time dimension allows for conducting a kind of natural experiment....

We study the role of firms' political influence on the effectiveness of government spending using ARRA as a laboratory. Through an IV approach, we show that a 10 percentage points increase in the share of politically connected spending lowers the job creation effect of stimulus by 33 percent at...

The paper studies empirically fiscal policies around elections in 25 developing countries as affected by the exchange regime. It is argued that countries with flexible exchange regimes are less likely to engage in expansionary fiscal policies before elections because such policies can result in...

The paper studies empirically the fiscal policy instruments by which governments try to influence election outcomes in 24 developing countries for the 1973-1992 period. The study finds that the main vehicle for expansionary fiscal policies around elections is increasing public expenditure rather...

Purpose: Our study assesses financial development and debt status impact on energy efficiency in Nigeria as a developing economy. Methodology: We combined the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL), FMOLS, and CCR analytical methods to estimate the parameters for energy efficiency policy...

Cloyne (2013) constructs a novel dataset documenting fiscal tax shocks in the United Kingdom using the narrative approach developed by Romer and Romer (2010), and estimates the impact of tax changes on GDP. He finds that a tax cut of one percent of GDP causes a 0.6 percent increase in output in...

Cloyne (2013) constructs a novel dataset documenting fiscal tax shocks in the United Kingdom using the narrative approach developed by Romer and Romer (2010), and estimates the impact of tax changes on GDP. He finds that a tax cut of one percent of GDP causes a 0.6 percent increase in output in...

For more than 25 years, the Social Security Trust Fund has been projected to run out of money in 2033 (give or take a few years), potentially causing benefits to be severely reduced in the absence of corrective legislative action. Today (February 2024), projections are made by the Social...