A microeconomic theoretical model shows that two factors - the compensation and progressivity effects - produce the shifting (if any) of tax rates on wage formation. From an analytical viewpoint, they may be positive or negative and of equal or different sign. A microfounded nested macroeconomic...

Avocates of formal fiscal restraints on the member states of the European Monetary Union often argue that US experience proves that a monetary union needs such constraints to guarantee the stability of the common currency. We show, first, that the origin of formal fiscal restraints on US state...

Administrative and political reorganization is being actively debated even in the mature, stable economies of Western Europe. This paper investigates the possibility of such reorganization being tied to the integration of economic markets. The paper describes the equilibrium of a game where...

In spite of ongoing dramatic changes in labor market structure, transitional economies display rather low worker flows across sectors and occupations. Such low mobility can be explained by low returns to job changes as well as by market segmentation in the allocation of job offers. We develop an...

This Paper investigates the importance of fiscal policy in providing macroeconomic stabilisation in a monetary union. We use a microfounded New Keynesian model of a monetary union that incorporates persistence in inflation, and examine non-cooperative interactions of fiscal and monetary...

This Paper introduces an index of tax optimality that measures the distance of some current tax structure from the optimal tax structure in the presence of public goods. In doing so, we derive a [0; 1] number that reveals immediately how far the current tax configuration is from the optimal one...

This Paper models aid agencies as financial intermediaries that do not make a financial return to depositors, since the depositors' concern is to transfer resources to investor-beneficiaries. This leads to a significant problem of verification of the agencies' activities. One solution to this...

In 1998, the Swiss voters approved of an increase in female retirement age from 62 to 64. The referendum, being on a single issue only, offers a unique opportunity to explore the political feasibility of pension reforms and to apply theoretical models of life-cycle decision making. Estimates...

We derive the statistical properties of the SNP densities of Gallant and Nychka (1987). We show that these densities, which are always positive, are more general than the truncated Gram-Charlier expansions of Jondeau and Rockinger (2001), who impose parameter restrictions to ensure positivity....

This paper evaluates VAR models designed to analyse the monetary policy transmission mechanism in the United States by considering three issues: specification, identification, and the effect of the omission of the long-term interest rate. Specification analysis suggests that only VAR models...