Local governments often enjoy "home rule," in the sense that they are able to initiate legislation concerning municipal affairs without obtaining the prior consent of the state legislature. At the same time, these localities often are able to exercise limited discretion over revenue raising. In...

In his American Economic Association Presidential Address Olivier Blanchard argued that the deficits caused by the 2017 Tax Cut are welfare enhancing. Growth of the economy is greater than interest costs, both currently and usually and that indicates we are borrowing when we are relatively poor...

The COVID-19 pandemic causes sharp reductions in economic output and sharp increases in government expenditures. This increases the riskiness of sovereign debts, especially in emerging economies. We propose a framework to study debt sustainability. The economy is subject to productivity and...

The article aims to provide a new approach to the modelling of fiscal policy effectiveness in Azerbaijan. It is argued that massive transfer of oil revenues from SOFAZ to state budget after 2008 has sharply declined the impact of budget expenditures over non-oil sector economic performance, so...

It is claimed that tax policy is neither time- nor space-independent due to cross-border tax base mobility that induces spillovers. In other words, fiscal shocks in one country are supposed to have impact on fiscal policies in other countries. This paper verifies this question in two ways....

Within the context of currency and maturity choice, and indexation, this paper seeks to find the policy implications of a tax smoothing approach to public debt management. This objective is achieved in two ways. Firstly, the tax smoothing approach of Bohn (1990) is adapted to incorporate...

The standard analysis of the efficient management of income taxes and debt assumes a benevolent government and ignores potential distortions arising from rent-seeking politicians. This paper departs from this framework by assuming that a rent-seeking politician chooses policies. If the...

Two puzzling observations have motivated this paper: First, the standard paradigm of optimal fiscal policy, following Lucas & Stokey (1983), assumes counterfactually that public debt is held in state-contingent securities. Is the existing theory as irrelevant as it is silent about fiscal policy...

This paper provides estimates of the supply elasticity of municipal debt and explores heterogeneity across different types of local governments by exploiting a discrete jump in interest rates created by the Tax Reform Act (TRA) of 1986. In order to qualify for bank financing of tax-exempt debt,...

The U.S. is beset by weak economic growth, ballooning debt and stubbornly high unemployment but the collapse of the housing bubble that spurred the 2008-2009 global financial crisis was more a consequence than a cause of what is wrong. The real culprit was and remains poor policymaking in the...