In many countries the decentralization of spending responsibilities has outpaced the decentralization of revenue powers. Sub-national governments have then to rely on transfers from the center and borrowing to finance their spending. When this occurs, we find that the overall fiscal deficit...

We argue that job performance appraisal is an agency problem with asymmetric transfer values: an employee is paid in proportion to the rating received from his line manager, who only partially internalizes the resultant payroll cost. This asymmetry in rating valuations is based on evidence that...

This paper uses the IMF’s Global Integrated Monetary and Fiscal Model (GIMF) to assess the impact of fiscal consolidation on the Czech economy. Its contribution is threefold. First, it provides estimates of dynamic fiscal multipliers for a variety of fiscal instruments (tax and...

We address the following question: how does a higher education funding system influence the trade-off that universities make between research and teaching? We do so by constructing a model that allows universities to choose actively the quality of their teaching and research when faced with...

Starting from endogenous growth models we test the impacts of both taxes (distortionary and non-distortionary) and expenditures (taking into account economic and functional classification of general government expenditure) using the government constraint. We do not neglect the implicit financing...

This paper updates existing measures of the U.S. fiscal gap to include federal laws up to and including the mid-December 2010 federal fiscal stimulus. It then applies the methodology of generational accounting to establish how the burden of adjustment required to attain fiscal sustainability is...

How does the South African government react to changes in its debt position? In investigating the question, this paper estimates fiscal reaction functions using various methods (OLS, VAR, TAR, GMM, State-Space modelling and VECM). The paper finds that since 1946 the South African government has...

This paper proposes a set of fiscal indicators to assess rollover risks using the conceptual framework developed by Cottarelli (2011). These indicators provide early warning signals about the manifestation of these risks, giving policymakers the opportunity to adjust policies before extreme...