The ability of voters to monitor government officials is complicated by the large changes in government spending caused by the business cycle. Voters may be uncertain about the cumulative effect of changes in spending that occur over several years, and thus budget allocations may be different from voters’ ideal. For the years 1989 through 2006, we examine states’ responses to revenue shocks, wh...

In recent years, the renewed strength of immigration to the United States has sparked a debate about the economic effects of immigration. A central issue in this debate has been the fiscal impact of immigrants. Most research in this area has adopted a static, cross-section approach in assessing the net impact of immigrants on the economy’s fiscal position. However, a dynamic approach is importa...

This paper takes a step toward providing a general equilibrium framework within which to study the nub of the current fiscal debate around the world: what are the tradeoffs between short-run stabilization and long-run sustainability when the perceived riskiness of government debt depends, in part, on the current and expected fiscal environment in place? We calibrate a simple model to Swedish fi...

This paper discusses the need and scope for an active fiscal stabilization policy. It is argued that the effectiveness of fiscal policy as a short run stabilizer does not depend on the long run multipliers of (balanced budget) fiscal policies. To the extent that activity can be affected by aggregate demand in the short run, there is a case for a fiscal stabilization policy in terms of temporary...

The transition process from E-government to e-democracy involves a number of complex government changes, among which one of the important reforms for China, lies in the fundamental transform of its public finance regime from a “secret tradition” which has been holding for centuries long, towards a modern democratic open process. From 2003, Chinese government decided to release the Audit Report ...

Political violence, coup d’état, civil wars and inter-state wars, all have fiscal dimensions (and sometimes fiscal causes). Who gets what—public employment and public spending—and who has to pay for it, are questions that raise fundamental issues about the distribution of society's resources. These can only be resolved peacefully by some form of social contract, resting on the foundation of eff...

In times of rapid macroeconomic change it would seem useful for both fiscal and monetary policy to be modified frequently. This is true for monetary policy with monthly meetings of the Open Market Committee. It is not true for fiscal policy which mostly varies with the annual Congressional budget cycle. This paper proposes a feedback framework for analyzing the question of whether or not moveme...

Modeling and Computational Strategies for Optimal Development Planning of Offshore Oilfields under Complex Fiscal Rules Vijay Gupta and Ignacio E. Grossmann Department of Chemical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Abstract The main goal of this paper is to extend a simple NPV (net present value) based optimal oilfield development planning model to include complex fisc...

We study the implications of fiscal policy behavior for sovereign risk in a framework that develops a country’s fiscal limit, the point at which for economic or political reasons taxes and spending can no longer adjust to stabilize debt. A real business cycle model maps the economic environment—expected fiscal policy, the distribution of exogenous disturbances, and private agents’ behavior—into...

The present paper reassesses the role of monetary conservatism in a setting with nominal government debt and endogenous fiscal policy. We assume that macroeconomic policies are chosen by monetary and fiscal policy makers who interact repeatedly but cannot commit to future actions. The real level of public liabilities is an endogenous state variable, and policies are chosen in a non-cooperative ...