Do budget institutions play a role in explaining why government effectiveness is higher in some advanced countries than in others? Employing an original panel dataset that spans four different years (1991, 2003, 2007 and 2012) we find that budget centralization has a negative and significant...

This paper investigates the drastic reduction in public spending in OECD countries during the 1990s. Using a panel data set of 18 countries, we find this adjustment to be a general OECD development, beginning in 1994, and that participation in the Maastricht Treaty or in the Stability and Growth...

This paper shows that a policy maker needs only two types of information to set the optimal income tax rate at the top: the compensated elasticity of labor supply and the shape of income distribution. Unlike recent results in the literature our paper shows that income effects are immaterial for...

In this paper I simulate the entrance to the labor market in the presence of cultural barriers that constraint labor market participation of low-income workers. In this case, an optimal EITC depends on social planner's relative preferences for persistently unemployed and working poor. I check...

Rignano (1919) proposed to tax heavier the inheritances that were transferred between more than one generation. The lack of an economic model showing the rational of Rignano's tax scheme, drove policy makers to ignore his proposal and to avoid its implementation. In this paper we build a model...

By simulating social planner's optimal redistributive policy, this paper analyzes government's high education policy in a dual economy composed by skilled workers that invest in education and unskilled workers that do not. In a developed economy, characterized by an equilibrium with low...

In this paper I use a labor market equilibrium model and a social welfare analysis for comparing between an employee-based EITC and an employer-based system. Since the labor supply of the low-wage workers is relatively rigid, firms enjoy market power that might be used in detriment of the...

Using a sample of OECD countries, this paper finds that while fiscal rules succeeded in reducing total government expenditures and budget deficits in the medium term, they significantly affected the composition of government expenditure: the ratio of social transfers to government consumption...