We provide a comprehensive survey of the recent literature on the link between productive government expenditure and economic growth. Starting with the seminal paper of Robert Barro (1990) we show that an understanding of the core results of the ensuing contributions can be gained from the study...

This paper analyses the reaction of fiscal policy to the cycle in OECD countries. The results suggest that while overall government balances were counter-cyclical in the past and more so in economic downturns than in upswings, discretionary fiscal policy was neutral on average. However,...

We study the dynamic Ramsey problem of finding optimal public debt and linear taxes on capital and labor income within a tractable infinite horizon model with incomplete markets. With zero public expenditure and debt, it is optimal to tax the risky labor income and subsidize capital, while a...

This paper analyzes the welfare effects of the Italian social security system in an economy with uncertainty on wages, financial market returns and life expectancy. The introduction of a pension system reproducing the Italian statutory scheme turns out to decrease ex-ante individual welfare,...

Large and growing levels of public debt in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and the Euro Area raise new interest in the cross-country effects of a large open economy’s deficits. We consider a dynamic optimising model with costly tax collection and exogenously given public spending and...

This paper studies the aggregate and distributional implications of Markov-perfect tax-spending policy in a neoclassical growth model with capitalists and workers. Focusing on the long run, our main findings are: (i) it is optimal for a benevolent government, which cares equally about its...

This paper studies the design of tax systems that implement a planner’s second-best allocation in a market economy. An example shows that the widely used Mirrleesian (1976) tax system cannot implement all incentive-compatible allocations. Hammond’s (1979) “principle of taxation” proves...

The 2008 financial crisis is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1929. It has been characterised by a housing bubble in a context of rapid credit expansion, high risk-taking and exacerbated financial leverage, leading to deleveraging and credit crunch when the bubble burst....

We consider an R&D-driven endogenous growth model in which innovation is risky and agents are risk averse. Growth is determined by the occupational choice of agents who can either work in production for a wage or become entrepreneurs. In this context, we examine the impact of redistributive...

The literature on indirect tax reforms in pollution-ridden economies is quite limited. This paper, using a model of a small open economy with production and consumption generated pollution, considers the welfare implications of tax reforms within an integrated structure of consumption and...