COVID-19 became a global health emergency when it threatened the catastrophic collapse of health systems as demand for health goods and services and their relative prices surged. Governments responded with lockdowns and increases in transfers. Empirical evidence shows that lockdowns and...

What are the macroeconomic effects of tax adjustments in response to large public debt shocks in highly integrated economies? The answer from standard closed-economy models is deceptive, because they underestimate the elasticity of capital tax revenues and ignore cross-country spillovers of tax...

This paper quantifies the macroeconomic effects of capital income tax competition in the European Union using a two-country neoclassical dynamic general equilibrium model. This model incorporates three key externalities of tax competition: the relative price externality, the wealth distribution...

Theory predicts that strategically-determined tax rates induce negative externalities across countries in relative prices, the wealth distribution and tax revenue. This paper studies the interaction of these externalities in a dynamic, general equilibrium environment and its effects on...

This paper proposes a method for computing tax rates using national accounts and revenue statistics. Using this method we construct time-series of tax rates for large industrial countries. The method identifies the revenue raised by different taxes at the general government level and defines...

During the period 1991-93, Finland experienced the deepest economic downturn in an industrialized country since the 1930s. We argue that the culprit behind this Great Depression was the collapse of Finnish trade with the Soviet Union, because it induced a costly restructuring of the...

Recent quantitative studies predict large welfare gains from reducing tax distortions in a closed economy, despite costly transitional dynamics to more efficient tax systems. This paper examines transitional dynamics and gains of tax reforms for countries in a global economy, and provides...

Using Korean firm-level data on publicly-listed and privately-held firms together with firm exit data, we find strong evidence of the balance-sheet effect for small firms at both the intensive and extensive margins. During the crisis, small firms with more short-term foreign debt are more likely...

The question of what is a sustainable public debt is paramount in the macroeconomic analysis of fiscal policy. This question is usually posed as asking whether the outstanding public debt and its projected path are consistent with those of the government's revenues and expenditures (i.e. whether...

We examine austerity in advanced economies since the Great Recession. Austerity shocks are reductions in government purchases that exceed reduced-form forecasts. Austerity shocks are statistically associated with lower real GDP, lower inflation and higher net exports. We estimate a...