BACKGROUND Countries across Europe have introduced a wide variety of policies to improve nutrition. However, the sheer diversity of interventions represents a potentially bewildering smorgasbord. We aimed to map existing public health nutrition policies, and examine their perceived effectiveness, in order to inform future evidence-based diet strategies. METHODS We created a public health nutr...

Does a government’s source of revenue explain its policies? The predominate view in development studies contends that policy variation results directly from institutional variation. Building on a literature which we label fiscal theories of governance, we argue that a government’s sources of revenue strongly affect its public expenditures, independent of institutions. Using data from local gove...

Taxes and transfers can have significant impacts on poverty and inequality. All standard measures are by definition anonymous in the sense that we do not know the identity of winners and losers. That a given combination of taxes and transfers makes some of the poor poorer, however, may be important information to incorporate into a fiscal incidence analysis. The directional mobility literature ...

Fiscal foresight—the phenomenon that legislative and implementation lags ensure that private agents receive clear signals about the tax rates they face in the future—is intrinsic to the tax policy process. This paper develops an analytical framework to study the econometric implications of fiscal foresight. Simple theoretical examples show that foresight produces equilibrium time series with a ...

The desirability of fiscal constraints in monetary unions depends critically on whether the monetary authority can commit to follow its policies. If it can commit, then debt constraints can only impose costs. If it cannot commit, then fiscal policy has a free-rider problem, and debt constraints may be desirable. This type of free-rider problem is new and arises only because of a time inconsiste...

This paper analyses fiscal autonomy in Germany. First, it provides an overview of fiscal autonomy. What is novel in this paper compared to previous studies is the development of a fiscal autonomy coefficient for the states, based on communal data. The basic intention in the empirical part is to analyse how fiscal autonomy affects the tax morale, defined as the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes,...

We study the tension between fiscal decentralization and progressive taxation. We present a multi-community model in which households differ in incomes and housing preferences and in which the local income tax rate is a function of an exogenous progressive tax schedule and an endogenous local tax shifter. The progressivity of the tax schedule induces a self-sorting process that results in subst...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that the major cost of sovereign default lies in its effects on the domestic financial system, rather than any external sanctions. To explore this link, we extend the banking model of Gertler and Karadi (2011) to allow banks to hold risky long-term government debt, and then incorporate bank runs following Gertler and Kiyotaki (2013). Banks face an agency probl...

This paper examines the evolution and functioning of fiscal decentralisation process and intergovernmental finance in the Republic of South Africa (RSA). It analyses the system of dividing revenues among the three spheres of government. The paper highlights the challenges of designing and implementing intergovernmental fiscal policies and institutions in the post-apartheid era. The paper argues...