The paper addresses the classical question how to lead the economy from a recession back to full employment in an open economy. In a recession caused by an adverse demand shock, optimal policies crucially depend on whether the income multiplier related to a policy is bigger than unity. This...

Central concerns of research and innovation policies under uncertainty and systemic complexity are market and systemic failures, i.e. both market corrections as well as co-ordination and coherence are essential elements of policy making. Therefore, policy making cannot be based on the notions of...

This paper studies a revenue-neutral green tax reform that substitutes energy for wage taxes in an open economy with unemployment. As long as the labour tax rate exceeds the energy tax rate, such a reform will increase employment, reduce the domestic firms' unit cost of production and hence...

We analyze housing taxation from a political economy perspective. Our aim is to understand why the US tax system favors owner housing with respect to business capital despite the efficiency losses involved. The starting point of our analysis is the observation that housing wealth is much more...

We incorporate a renewable resource into an overlapping generations model without capital and with quasi-linear preferences. Besides being an input for production the resource serves as a store of value. We characterize the dynamics, efficiency and stability of the steady state equilibria. The...

Future improvements in mortality are difficult to forecast. In this paper, we incorporate uncertainty about future mortality, or aggregate mortality risk, into an otherwise standard life cycle model with an intertemporal consumption-savings decision. The aggregate mortality process is calibrated...