This paper studies the wasteful effect of bureaucracy on the economy by addressing the link between opportunistic behavior of government bureaucrats and the public sector wage bill. In particular, public officials are modeled as individuals competing for a larger share of those public funds. A...

This paper explores the effects of fiscal policy in an economy based on indirect taxes, and taxing all income at the same rate. The focus of the paper is on the relative importance of consumption vs. income taxation, as well as on the provision of valuable public services. To this end, a...

This paper utilizes an otherwise standard micro-founded general-equilibrium setup, which is augmented with a revenue-extraction mechanism to assess the magnitude of VAT evasion. The model is calibrated to Bulgaria after the introduction of the currency board (1999-2014), as one of the very few...

In this paper we investigate the quantitative importance of search and matching fric- tions in Bulgarian labor markets. This is done by augmenting an otherwise standard real business cycle model a la Long and Plosser (1983) with both a two-sided costly search and fiscal policy. This introduces a...

This paper studies the wasteful effect of bureaucracy on the economy by addressing the link between opportunistic behavior of government bureaucrats and the public sector wage bill. In particular, public officials are modeled as individuals competing for a larger share of those public funds. A...

This paper provides a quantitative evaluation of the welfare effect of the introduc- tion of proportional taxation in Bulgaria in 2008, an effect that operates through the grey economy channel. Using a general-equilibrium model, augmented with informal sector, a computational experiment is...