Economic issues will be key determinants of the outcome of the Scottish referendum on independence. Pensions are a key element of the economic case for or against independence. The costs of funding pensions in an independent Scotland would be influenced by mortality risks, the costs of borrowing...

This paper reviews the key issues concerning the impact of public spending and taxation on long-run growth and inequality and takes stock of existing theoretical and empirical studies. Overall, the evidence highlights that the size of the government matters for long-term growth as a too large...

In thinking about policy, academic economists alternate between theoretical models in which governments can design finely-tuned optimal interventions and practical considerations which usually assume the government to be incompetent and hostage to special interests. I argue in this paper that...

This paper assesses the effects of applying VAT or a sales tax on (intermediate or final) sales of the financial sector. It uses a CGE Model calibrated for a small open economy. It highlights the differentiated sectoral and redistributional effects of these taxes and shows the importance of the...

This paper studies pension fund design in the context of investment in the debt and equity of a firm. We employ a general equilibrium framework to demonstrate that: (i) the asset location ‘puzzle’ is purely a partial equilibrium phenomenon, conceived in a risk neutral setting, that...

In times of crisis and uncertainty the countries look for solutions that will protect tax revenues from tax base erosion. In attempts of increasing the level of tax collection they try to fight tax avoidance and tax evasion. Among the difficult challenges faced by governments, there are also...

Agglomeration tendencies of industrial firms significantly affect the nature of tax competition. This paper analyzes tax competition between two countries over an infinite time horizon in an economy with trade costs and internationally mobile industrial firms. Most of the previous studies on tax...

In this paper, both a conjoint analysis and a lab experiment are conducted to analyze the influence of changes in the tax rate and the tax base on the perceived tax burden. Our results show that the majority of individuals do not make rational tax decisions based on the actual tax burden but...

Fiscal harmonization among the European Union member states is a goal involving major difficulties for its implementation. Each country faces a particular trade-off between fiscal revenues generated by taxation and the productive efficiency loss induced by their respective tax code. This paper...

Several contributions have recently assessed the size of fiscal multipliers both in RBC models and in New Keynesian models. This paper computes fiscal multipliers within a labor selection model with turnover costs and Nash bargained wages. We find that demand stimuli yield small multipliers, as...