We assess the correlations between tribalism and financial development in 123 countries using data averages from 2000-2010. The tribalism index is used to measure tribalism whereas financial development is measured from perspectives of financial intermediary and stock market developments. The...

This paper is concerned with a policy oriented macroeconomic experiment involving an 'international' economy with a relatively small 'home' country and a large 'foreign' country. It compares the economic performance of two alternative tax systems as a means to finance unemployment benefits: a...

The paper investigates the effects of temporary consumption tax cuts using firm-level data. As part of its countercyclical measures implemented during the recent global economic crisis, Tur-key temporarily lowered consumption taxes on selected durables. Our empirical strategy ex-ploits variation...

In a recent review article Jonas Agell, Thomas Lindh and Henry Ohlsson (1997) claim that theoretical and empirical evidence does not allow any conclusion on whether there is a relationship between the rate of economic growth and the size of the public sector. They illustrate their conclusion...

A number of cross-country comparisons do not find a robust negative relationship between government size and economic growth. In part this may reflect the prediction in economic theory that a negative relationship should exist primarily for rich countries with large public sectors. In this paper...

The Structural Vector Auto-regression (SVAR) approach to estimating fiscal multipliers, following the seminal paper by Blanchard and Perotti (2002), has been widely applied in the literature. In our pa-per we discuss the interpretation of these estimates and suggest that they are more useful for...

In the present paper I examine tax revenue projections in Germany over the period 1968 to 2012 with a focus on forecasting rationality. I show that tax revenue forecasts for themedium-term are upward biased. Overoptimistic revenue projections are particularly pronounced after the German...

This article is dedicated to a study of the relations between the economy and the size of the general government sector. The main aim of the article is an identification of the most important variables that are used to determine relations between the economy and size of the sector, as well as to...

During the Greek crisis the wealth tax on real estate (WTRE) was increased four-fold as a percentage of GDP in order to boost fiscal revenues. This increase contributed to an essentially complete freeze of the real estate market, a considerable drop in real estate prices, and a substantial...

The empirical literature using vector autoregressive models to assess the effects of fiscal policy shocks strongly disagrees on even the qualitative response of key macroeconomic variables to government spending and tax shocks. We provide new evidence for the U.S. over the period 1955-2006. We...