This paper presents a two-country dynamic perfect foresight Ricardian model with wealth effects to study the relationship between government spending financed by alternative taxation, the terms of trade and welfare. An increase in domestic government spending financed by a distortionary capital income tax leads the real exchange rate initially to appreciate (a pure demand effect). But along the...

The welfare cost of imperfect competition in the product and labor markets in the United States is quantified in a dynamic general equilibrium model. We find that the welfare cost of imperfect competition in the product market is 3.62 percent while it is 0.58 percent in the labor market, taking the transition path from the distorted to the optimal steady state into account. If we also take into...

We analytically and quantitatively examine a prominent justi…cation for capital income taxation: goods preferred by those with high ability ought to be taxed. We study an environment where commodity taxes are allowed to be nonlinear functions of income and consumption and show that a relationship between ability and preferences over goods provides a novel reason for sophisticated distortionary ...

Payroll taxes represent a major distortionary in uence of governments on labor markets. This paper examines the role of payroll taxation and the social safety net for cyclical uctuations in an nonmonetary economy with labor market frictions and unemployment insurance, when the latter is only imperfectly related to search e ort. A balanced social insurance budget renders gross wages more rigid o...

The evaluation of public expenditures is a central concern of development economics-and a concern highlighted by the increasingly stringent budget constraints in both developing and developed countries. This task has also become increasingly difficult as governments have moved their focus away from providing private, tradable, goods towards public goods that are provided either without charge, ...

We examine preferences for redistribution inherent in Swedish tax policy during 1971–2012 using the inverse optimal tax approach. The income distribution is carefully characterized with the help of administrative register data, and we employ behavioral elasticities reflecting the perceived distortionary effects of taxation. The revealed social welfare weights are high for non-workers, small for...

We develop an endogenous growth model driven by externalities from both private and public capital. The government levies distortionary taxation to finance a publicly provided consumption good and public infrastructure. Firms face adjustment costs. We compare the optimal and time-consistent policies in a linearquadratic approximation of the model. Although the time-consistent equilibrium is sub...

This paper introduces habit-forming preferences in a Barro-type endogenous growth model with productive public services. Government expenditure, which may be subject to congestion, is financed by distortionary income taxation. Different from the standard time-separable model, the presence of habits makes the economy feature transitional dynamics, which are solved in closed form. Setting the inc...

We reconsider the role of an inflation conservative central banker in a setting with distortionary taxation. To do so, we assume monetary and fiscal policy are decided by independent authorities that do not abide to past commitments. If the two authorities make policy decisions simultaneously, inflation conservatism causes fiscal overspending. But if fiscal policy is determined before monetary ...