The integration of world capital markets carries important implications for the design and impact of tax policies. This paper evaluates research findings on international taxation, drawing attention to connections and inconsistencies between theoretical and empirical observations. Diamond and Mirrlees (1971) note that small open economies incur very high costs in attempting to tax the returns t...

This paper studies the effectiveness of tax amnesties and their impacts on capital taxation public spending. We leverage rich policy variation from Argentina, where left- right-wing governments implemented multiple programmes achieved varying success. After numerous failed enforcement efforts, its 2016 scheme reportedly revealed assets worth 21 per cent GDP—the world’s most successful amnesty. ...

Premiums on U.S. sovereign CDS have risen to persistently elevated levels since the financial crisis. We ask whether these premiums reflect the probability of a fiscal default – a state in which budget balance can no longer be restored by raising taxes or eroding the real value of debt by raising inflation. We develop an equilibrium macrofinance model in which the fiscal and monetary policy sta...

The U.S. federal government is facing the prospect of exponentially rising entitlement obligations that are threatening to push the debt-to-GDP ratio to historically unparalleled levels. In an effort to understand the economic consequences of these projected debt run-ups, this paper takes a stand on how future policy must adjust and examines its implications for the aggregate economy. Assuming ...

This paper analyses the effects of discretionary fiscal policy by presenting new empirical evidence for Germany within a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) framework. Following Blanchard and Perotti (2002), the SVAR model is identified by applying institutional information. We find no compelling evidence for the effectiveness of discretionary fiscal policy. Cutting taxes does not tend to s...

Worldwide monetary and fiscal policies in the past few years have put into sharp relief the fundamental tradeoff between short-run stabilization and long-run sustainability that policymakers face. The paper is organized around this question: How do the effects of routine monetary and fiscal operations designed to achieve macroeconomic stabilization objectives change when the economy moves from ...

The OECD’s report on income inequality, Divided We Stand (2011), documented that the gap between rich and poor in OECD countries had widened continuously over the three decades to 2008, reaching an all-time high. New OECD data show that the global economic crisis has squeezed incomes from work and capital in most countries. Excluding the mitigating effects of the welfare state, via taxes and tr...

This paper reviews literature on the optimal design of pricing policies to reduce urban automobile congestion. The implications of a range of complicating factors are considered, such as traffic bottlenecks, constraints on which roads and freeway lanes in the road network can be priced, driver heterogeneity, private toll operators, other externalities besides congestion, and interactions betwee...

Does a monetary union need fiscal shock absorbers helping the participating countries to cope with asymmetric shocks? The consensus in the debate over EMU argues that the answer is yes. In this paper, we revisit the issue, building on a dynamic, general equilibrium framework of regions in a monetary union exposed to asymmetric shocks. We show that inter-regional taxes and transfers can stabiliz...

In fiscal year 1970, U.S. federal cigarette tax revenues accounted for 13 percent of all federal excise tax collections and 1 percent of total federal budget receipts. By fiscal year 1980, federal cigarette tax revenues accounted for only 10 percent of all federal excise tax collections and only 0.5 percent of total federal budget receipts.’ In fiscal year 1970, U.S. state and local cigarette t...