Should a government have more than one fiscal rule constraining fiscal aggregates? If so, why? In this paper, we present a dynamic general equilibrium model of a small open economy featuring an incumbent government to assess how and why implementing a budget balance rule and a debt anchor rule...

Using a narrative account of quarterly discretionary changes in tax liabilities from 1974Q4 to 2018Q2 in a VAR setting, we study whether legislative tax changes affect the trade balance in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. As legislative tax changes we consider (i) all changes,...

During the last thirty years, labor markets in advanced economies were characterized by their remarkable polarization. As job opportunities in middle-skill occupations disappeared, employment opportunities concentrated in the highest- and lowest-wage occupations. I develop a two-country...

Members of the US House of Representatives have proposed a major overhaul of the US corporate tax system, the so-called "destination-based border-adjusted cash-flow tax" (DBCFT). The literature on the economic implications and spillovers of such a DBCFT is scarce. This paper aims to provide a...

This study employs computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to estimate the effect of increase in value added tax (VAT), from 5 per cent to 7.5 per cent, on import demand and sectoral output in Nigeria. The study uses 2020 as the base year for the data analysis. The results show that increase...

Motivated by the highly-unionized public sectors, the high public shares in total employment, and the public sector wage premia observed in Europe, this paper examines the importance of public sector unions for macroeconomic theory. The model gen- erates cyclical behavior in hours and wages that...

We investigate cross-country fiscal policy spillovers through the integration of capital markets in a currency union and allow capital use in production to differ across countries. Following empirical evidence, we assume that production exhibits capital-skill complementarity. Using a...

We study the interactions between capital income tax and social security privatization in the context of rising longevity. In an economy with idiosyncratic income shocks, redistributive defined benefit social security provides some insurance against income uncertainty. This insurance comes at...

This paper studies the short-run macroeconomic effects of legislated tax changes in Germany using a vector autoregression (VAR) approach. Identification of the tax shock follows the narrative approach recently proposed by Romer and Romer (2010). Results indicate a moderate, but statistically...

Member countries of the euro area, and the peripheral states in particular, face an especially difficult problem: on the one hand, they urgently need stronger economic growth to reduce high debt and unemployment levels. On the other hand, however, they have no scope to use fiscal policy to...