Post-Soviet economies are plagued by a public-sector practice whereby the Ministry of Finance cancels tax liabilities that enterprises owe it in exchange for debts the Ministry owes enterprises. While the practice seems innocuous enough to its practitioners, it has multiple distorting effects....

In this paper I examine the determinants of the user cost of housing, including house price inflation expectations and tax policy. I derive estimates of the user cost of housing for several U.S. metropolitan areas over the period 1995-2008 and I decompose those estimates into user cost component...

In this paper I examine a variety of political economy indicators that have become popular in recent years in order to see what we can learn about tax systems and economic development across countries. While each of the indicators is intended to reveal some aspect of the institutional policy...