Societies often rely on simple rules to restrict the size and behavior of governments. When fiscal and monetary policies are conducted by a discretionary and profligate government, I find that revenue ceilings vastly outperform debt, deficit and monetary rules, both in effectiveness at curbing...

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between the net interest margin (NIM) of US and European banks and market interest rates in a low interest rate environment. We contribute to the literature by examining a large sample of annual data on 1,155 banks from United States and EU member...