This paper analyzes the scope for systematic rules-based fiscal activism in open economies. Relative to a balanced budget rule, automatic stabilizers significantly improve welfare. But they minimize fiscal instrument volatility rather than business cycle volatility. A more aggressively countercyclical tax revenue gap rule increases welfare gains by around 50 percent, with only modest increases ...

OBJECTIVES To investigate whether increasing state cigarette taxes and/or enacting stronger smoke-free air (SFA) policies have negative impact on convenience store density in a state, a proxy that is determined by store openings and closings, which reflects store profits. METHODS State-level business count estimates for convenience stores for 50 states and District of Columbia from 1997 to 20...

The regressive nature of consumption taxes poses a challenge to partisan theory. Using data for up to 20 OECD countries in the period 1970-2003 this article aims to explore the question of whether the idea that social democratic governments typically have to compromise on policy goals and core constituency interests to make themselves more appealing to the median voter necessitates the use of r...

Public Policy involves proposing changes to existing practices, alternatives, new habits. Citizens and institutions react accordingly, accepting, refuting or adapting. Agent-based modeling is a tool that can enrich the policy analysis package explicitly considering dynamics, space and individual-level interactions. This paper presents a modeling platform called PolicySpace that models public po...

No ONE WOULD dream of designing the human anatomy by disconnecting the controls of the left and right sides of the body. Yet, for the most important economic controls in a modern economy, monetary and fiscal policies, economists today generally endorse the separation of powers as a way of optimizing noninflationary growth. What are the costs and benefits of coordination and independence in macr...

Public school finance mechanisms differ from state to state, and they are often extremely complex. Most commonly, the federal government contributes about 7% of the total school budget, and the remainder is split fairly evenly between local contributions (primarily raised through local property taxes) and state contributions (primarily raised through state income taxes and sales taxes). The ave...

This paper evaluates the interacted effects of the fiscal and monetary policies on the nominal and real macro-variables of the Iranian economy. Our analysis is thus based on the optimal control theory by which the optimal path of the control variables including monetary and fiscal tools are determined over the period 1963-2006. We also use a macro-econometric model in form of a simultaneous equ...

This paper uses the case of fourteenth-century Portugal to question a common assumption of “fiscal history” literature, namely the linear relationship between war-related fiscal demands increase the level of taxation. It is shown that this relationship is not straightforward and that not all wars decisively affect fiscal systems. In fact, as some contemporaries suggested, the effects of war on ...