The existing empirical literature on the US federal revenue-expenditure nexus has had mixed findings. Amongst those papers presenting evidence in favor of causation running from taxes to expenditures, support for the conventional, Friedman-type tax-spend hypothesis is nearly ubiquitous. Evidence...

This paper tests the joint hypotheses that policymakers engage in fiscal policy opportunism and that voters respond by rewarding that opportunism with higher vote margins. Furthermore, it investigates the impact of fiscal illusion on the previous two dimensions. Empirical results, obtained with...