We analyze government interventions to alleviate debt overhang among banks. Interventions generate two types of rents. Informational rents arise from opportunistic participation based on private information while macroeconomic rents arise from free riding. Minimizing informational rents is a...

The incidence of taxation and the design of an optimal tax system have been extensively discussed in the public finance literature but mainly within a competitive market setting or within a homogenous good (Cournot type) oligopoly. In a differentiated product oligopoly, the effect of taxation...

This paper uses a new economic geography model to analyze tax competition between two countries trying to attract internationally mobile capital. Each government may levy a source tax on capital and a lump sum tax on fixed labor. If industry is concentrated in one of the countries, the analysis...

This paper surveys the recent literature on the theory of macroeconomic policy. We study the effect of various incentive constraints on the policy-making process, such as lack of credibility, political opportunism, political ideology, and divided government. The survey is organized in three...

This paper provides factual evidence on the extent of public intervention in the Italian economy. It further illustrates the internal contradictions and weaknesses of public action in Italy. New policy proposals to solve old structural problems of the Bel Paese are then discussed. Among them, a...

This paper presents an analysis of the Five Economists' plan for a "wage-tax trade-off", combining an EITC program with a freeze on award wage increases, as a policy package for reducing unemployment. The study identifies the changes in effective tax rates implied by the EITC program and shows...

Local merchant guilds were ubiquitous in medieval Europe, and their development was inextricably linked with the development of towns and the rise of the merchant class. We develop a theory of the emergence of local merchant guilds as an efficient mechanism to implement collusion among merchants...

In this paper we develop a small open economy, overlapping generations (OLG) model that incorporates non-stationary demographic transition paths to study the dynamic fiscal effects of demographic shift in Australia. Our main results are summarised as follows. First, the demographic shifts...

This paper provides a simple political agency model to explain the effect of political alignment between different tiers of government on intergovernmental grants and election outcomes. Key features of the model are: (i) rational voters interpret public good provision as a signal of incumbent...