This paper develops a tractable capitalist-worker New Keynesian model to study the interaction of fiscal policy and household heterogeneity. Workers can save in bonds subject to portfolio adjustment costs; firm ownership is concentrated among capitalists who do not supply labor. The model...

This study assesses the optimal size of government in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It uses the time series data over the period 1961-2013 and is based on a model using the Armey curve. It takes into account the possible effects of composition of public expenditure (wages and salaries,...

Nigeria has had an uninterrupted democratisation wave since 1999 and the country has had its share of macroeconomic instability in terms of high rates of inflation and huge debt profile due to high cost of governance. Against this background, this study test the hypothesis that government in...

Is inflation ‘always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon’ or is it fundamentally a fiscal phenomenon? This article augments a standard monetary model to incorporate fiscal details and credit market frictions. These ingredients allow for both interpretations of the inflation process in a...

The `saving for a rainy day' hypothesis implies that households' saving decisions reflect that they can (rationally) predict future income declines. The empirical relevance of this hypothesis plays a key role in discussions of fiscal policy multipliers and it holds under the null that the...

How large are government spending and tax multipliers? The fiscal proxy-SVAR literature provides heterogenous estimates, depending on which proxies - fiscal or non-fiscal - are used to identify fiscal shocks. We reconcile the existing estimates via a flexible vector autoregressive model that...

When in proxy-SVARs the covariance matrix of VAR disturbances is subject to exogenous, permanent, nonrecurring breaks that generate target impulse response functions (IRFs) that change across volatility regimes, even strong, exogenous external instruments can result in inconsistent estimates of...

This paper reconsiders the question of testing for the presence of Pareto suboptimal capital overaccumulation in overlapping generations economies. The paper allows generation‐specific technology shocks to evolve over time according to a stationary Markov chain, and assumes that an...

Following the global recession period of 2009, much debate has been cast on the role of tax policy in improving economic growth in the South African economy. In our paper, we estimate optimal tax rates for South Africa using the optimization model of Scully (1996, 2003) applied to quarterly data...

Fiscal balance is one of the main concerns of fiscal policy. Although academic and political choices on budget deficit vary due to perspective differences, improving the quality of revenue and expenditure forecasting has become prominent. The seminal researches on this topic present that tax...