This study examines the sources of uncertainty in predicting government tax revenues in Israel. In the first stage, we estimate a model based on several real and financial macroeconomic variables and identify a significant, stable and highly accurate relation between these variables and tax...

This paper studies the behavior of China’s foreign trade in the 1980s. Chinese customs data are used to construct, for the first time, quarterly unit value and volume series that are then used to estimate foreign trade income and price elasticities. The estimated export supply price...

Conventional wisdom is that good economic conditions or expansionary fiscal policy help incumbents get re-elected, but this has not been tested in a large cross-section of countries. We test these arguments in a sample of 74 countries over the period 1960-2003. We find no evidence that deficits...

The Israeli EITC program is based on individual incomes, unlike the EITC programs in the US and the UK, which supplement low-income families' earnings according to the combined family income. Using a large administrative panel dataset of tax and benefit records, and the natural experiment...

This paper explores the emergence of a world economy since 1950 and its implications for the world's labor force. There are four main sets of conclusions. First, although the integration of national economies since 1950 has been considerable, the world economy is still in its adolescence. Rapid...

This paper examines several aspects of Israel's restructured retirement benefits system, focusing on distributive effects. We characterize 10 stylized representative prototypes of Israeli households, reflecting common demographic, wage and employment profiles. These prototypes are used to...

Since a key function of competitive elections is to allow voters to express their policy preferences, one might take it for granted that when leadership changes, policy change follows. Using a dataset we created on the composition of central government expenditures in a panel of 71 democracies...