The fiscal contraction undertaken in Ireland in the late 80’s has received attention in the literature since it was followed by an expansion of aggregate demand and production. This has been considered an effect of the expectations of a lower future tax burden, which boosted private...

The current crisis calls for two main sets of policy measures. First, measures to repair the financial system. Second, measures to increase demand and restore confidence. While some of these measures overlap, the focus of this note is on the second set of policies, and more specifically, given...

The aging population has raised at least two concerns about tax policy. First, taxes will need to be increased to cover higher public-pension and medical-care expenses when baby boomers have retired. Second, taxes can be cut in the meantime, as the government realizes the "fiscal dividend" that...

Previous empirical studies have found a positive relationship between the size of legislature and the size of government. Those studies, however, do not adequately address the concerns of endogeneity. In contrast, this paper uses variation in legislature size induced by statutory council size...

Many analysts expect the aging population to lead to a reduction in the growth of living standards. Income inequality – a problem that has been accentuated by the payroll tax hikes that were necessary to fund the public pension as the population ages – is becoming an increasing challenge at...

The aging population has raised at least two concerns about tax policy. First, taxes will need to be increased to cover higher public-pension and medical-care expenses when baby boomers have retired. Second, taxes can be cut in the meantime, as the government realizes the "fiscal dividend" that...

The 1990s were an extraordinary period for the US economy, both because of declining budget deficits and beginning budget surpluses, as well as for high rates of economic growth. This paper confronts the conventional wisdom that high growth rates caused budget improvements, and claims that...

In 2007 Slovenia launched a comprehensive reform of its tax system. To estimate the different proposals (including a flat-tax proposal) and their overall effect on individual taxpayers and government budget a static micro-simulation model was constructed and combined with a computable general...

The basic answer to the question posed by the title is: yes. We follow Ewing et al. (2006) and examine the US federal revenue-expenditure nexus in an error-correction model allowing for asymmetric adjustment. Symmetric adjustment is rejected by data from the 1959.3 to 2007.4 period. However, as...