This paper examines the impact of tax incentives on corporate research and development (R&D) activity. Traditionally, R&D tax incentives have been provided in the form of special tax allowances and tax credits. In recent years, several countries moreover reduced their income tax rates on R&D...

Does fiscal policy have qualitatively different effects on the economy in a liquidity trap? We analyze a nonlinear stochastic New Keynesian model and compare the true and loglinearized equilibria. Using the loglinearized equilibrium conditions, the answer to the above question is yes. However,...

Facing the general election in 2013, the level of the income tax is a major issue of the economic policy debate in Germany. The paper presents data on the income tax burden in the period 1958-2012. The data refer to specific levels of real income as well as to specific levels of income in...

Friedman's book on the Óƒonsumption FunctionÔ is one of the great works of Economics demonstrating how the interplay between theoretical ideas and data analysis could lead to major policy implications. We present a short review of Friedman's Permanent Income Hypothesis, the origins of the...

Taxes and cash transfers reduce income inequality more in France than elsewhere in the OECD, because of the large size of the flows involved. But the system is complex overall. Its effectiveness could be enhanced in many ways, for example so as to achieve the same amount of redistribution at...

Through disaggregating public expenditures by economic functions this paper offers a new perspective on the existence and effectiveness of electorally motivated expenditure policy. The aim of the paper is to provide more detailed information on the specific expenditure categories by which...

The Ramsey approach to optimal taxation and Ramsey tax rules have amassed substance in economic theory. However, they are often criticized on grounds of practicality, fairness, feasibility and some other aspects of designing actual tax policy. This paper presents a collection of these views; it...

Cyclically induced changes in taxes and government expenditures which tend to stabilise aggregate output are called automatic stabilisers. Using a small macro model, this paper reviews alternative methods of measuring the smoothing power of automatic stabilisers and discusses their relationship...

We investigate the short-term effects of fiscal policy shocks on the German economy following the SVAR approach by Blanchard and Perotti (2002). We find that direct government expenditure shocks increase output and private consumption on impact with low statistical significance, while they...

How does private consumption react to an exogenous increase in government expenditure? Standard structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) usually report a positive GDP as well as consumption response, while event studies report a negative consumption response. We investigate in a SVAR whether...