In Germany, imposition of benefit cuts for non-compliant welfare recipients depends on the policy of the local welfare agencies resulting in considerable regional variation, expressed in milder and stricter sanction regimes. Findings from international studies show, that benefit sanctions can substantially increase individual employment uptake. This raises the question, whether a stricter use o...

The objective of this study is to measure the effect of global policy reforms on rice trade, prices, and economic welfare. The Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations aims to increase market access, and reduce or eliminate export subsidies and trade distorting domestic price supports. Two modeling frameworks are used to estimate trade, price and economic welfare effects of policy reforms....

The labor supply and other work incentive effects of welfare programs have long been a central concern in economic research. Work has also been an increasing focus of policy reforms in the U.S., culminating with a number of major policy changes in the 1990s whose intent was to increase employment and earnings levels of welfare recipients and other disadvantaged individuals. This paper reviews t...

The policy instruments for emissions reductions will be an integral part of a PostKyoto Climate Regime. Using the CGE model DART, we compare a harmonized international carbon tax to a cap-and-trade system with different emission caps. The carbon tax tends to favor industrialized countries while e.g. emissions trading under the “contraction and convergence” approach with converging per capita em...

This paper addresses two main questions. First, it examines the implications of financial frictions, embedded in a New Keynesian DSGE model with a banking sector, for the conduct of welfare-optimal monetary policy. Assuming only one monetary instrument, we analyse how financial frictions affect the gains from commitment and how different are the optimized simple rules with and without financial...

This paper provides a general framework for evaluating the welfare impact of government policy changes towards taxes, transfers, and publicly provided goods. The results show that the behavioral response required for welfare measurement is the causal impact of each agent’s response to the policy on the government’s budget. A decomposition of this response into income and substitution effects is...

The goal of this paper is to compute optimal monetary and fiscal policy rules in a real business cycle model augmented with sticky prices, a demand for money, taxation, and stochastic government consumption. We consider simple policy rules whereby the nominal interest rate is set as a function of output and inflation, and taxes are set as a function of total government liabilities. We require p...

A burgeoning part of the monetary policy design literature posits that optimal monetary policy is the solution to a constrained optimization problem where the monetary authority has the discretion to minimize a social welfare function, taking the economy and other policies as given. In their paper “Is Optimal Monetary Policy Always Optimal?” Troy Davig and Refet Gurkaynak (henceforth, DG) argue...

We study interactions between monetary policy, which sets nominal interest rates, and …scal policy, which levies distortionary income taxes to …nance public goods, in a standard, stickyprice economy with monopolistic competition. Policymakers’inability to commit in advance to future policies gives rise to excessive in‡ation and excessive public spending, resulting in welfare losses equivalent t...