Various tax policies provide consumers with forms of insurance. Social security has the payoff characteristics of an annuity. The income tax provides consumers with a degree of Income insurance because the government shares part of the individual's income risk. Redistributive taxes can be used to spread aggregate income risks across different generations The effects of these and other tax polic...

In this paper we use the common perspective provided by the neoclassical growth model to evaluate the size of the distortions associated with different monetary and fiscal policies designed to finance a given sequence of government expenditures. We calibrate a neoclassical monetary economy to match important features of the U.S. economy and use it to provide a quantitative assessment of the wel...

A partly heuristic attempt at exploring long-run policies aimed at a second-best compromise between ex ante risk-sharing efficiency and ex post productive efficiency. Wage subsidies for low-skilled workers financed by taxes on high wages are advocated, together with improved risk sharing between capital and labour, between generations and between the countries belonging to EMU. The scope of the...

Using an estimated DSGE model that features monetary and fiscal policy interactions and allows for equilibrium indeterminacy, we find that a passive monetary and passive fiscal policy regime prevailed in the pre-Volcker period while an active monetary and passive fiscal policy regime prevailed post-Volcker. Since both monetary and fiscal policies were passive pre-Volcker, there was equilibrium ...

Abstract Using an estimated DSGE model that features monetary and fiscal policy interactions and allows for equilibrium indeterminacy, we find that a passive monetary and passive fiscal policy regime prevailed in the pre-Volcker period while an active monetary and passive fiscal policy regime prevailed post-Volcker. Since both monetary and fiscal policies were passive pre-Volcker, there was equ...

the present paper examines the mitigating effect of monetary and fiscal policies on the “growth laffer curve” (glc) using a panel data of 38 high income countries over the period 2003-2012. adopting generalised method of moments (gmm) estimators, the paper finds evidence substantiating the presence of an inverted-u glc. moreover, the evidence suggests that the glc shifts downward by employing e...

We consider the implications for optimal fiscal policy when taxes are non-distortionary and households are heterogeneous and borrowing constrained. The main result is that optimal policy keeps some households borrowing constrained in order to reduce interest rates on government debt. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The paper presents the fiscal theory of the price level in a variety of models, including endowment economies with lump-sum taxes and production economies with proportional income taxes. We offer a microeconomic perspective on the fiscal theory by computing a Slutsky-Hicks decomposition of the effects of tax changes into substitution, wealth, and revaluation effects. Revaluation effects arise w...

A tax on soft drinks is often proposed as a health promotion strategy for reducing their consumption and improving health outcomes. However, little is known about the processes and politics of implementing such taxes. We analysed four different soft drink taxes in Pacific countries and documented the lessons learnt regarding the process of policy agenda-setting and implementation. While local s...