Fiscal adjustments and asset price changes

This paper examines the links between asset price movements and fiscal adjustments. Our findings suggest that higher asset prices improve fiscal balances and contribute to sustained consolidation. This refers in particular to real equity and real residential property prices. We find evidence that revenue windfalls due to higher residential, commercial property and equity prices can be sustained, thus, improving revenue and primary balances. There is evidence of a positive association of some asset prices changes with expenditure adjustments. Fiscal adjustments and in particular sharp spending cuts are more likely to be successful if undertaken in periods of dire budgetary and economic conditions.     

Fiscal transparency, political parties, and debt in OECD countries

Many believe and argue that fiscal, or budgetary, transparency has large, positive effects on fiscal performance. However, the evidence linking transparency and fiscal policy outcomes is less compelling. To analyze the effects of fiscal transparency on public debt accumulation, we present a career-concerns model with political parties. This allows us to integrate as implications of a single model three hitherto-separate results in the literature on deficit and debt accumulation: that transparency decreases debt accumulation (at least by reducing an electoral cycle in deficits), that right-wing governments (at least for strategic reasons) tend to have higher deficits than left-wing governments, and that increasing political polarization increases debt accumulation. To test the predictions of the model, we construct a replicable index of fiscal transparency on 19-country OECD data. Simultaneous estimates of debt and transparency strongly confirm that a higher degree of fiscal transparency is associated with lower public debt and deficits, independent of controls for explanatory variables from other approaches.     

Equilibrium unemployment with outsourcing and wage solidarity under labour market imperfections

We evaluate the effects of outsourcing and wage solidarity on wage formation and equilibrium unemployment in a heterogeneous labour market, where wages are determined by a monopoly labour union. We find that outsourcing promotes the wage dispersion between the high- and low-skilled workers. When the labour union adopts a solidaristic wage policy, it will dampen this tendency. Further, higher outsourcing will increase equilibrium unemployment among the high-skilled workers, whereas it will reduce it among the low-skilled workers. Overall, outsourcing will reduce economy-wide equilibrium unemployment under the reasonable condition that the proportion of high-skilled workers is sufficiently low.     

Unions, monetary shocks and the labour market cycle

This paper provides a new growth model by considering strategic behaviour in the supply of labour. Workers form a labour union with the aim of manipulating wages for their own benefit. We analyse the implications on labour market dynamics at business cycle frequencies of getting away from the price-taking assumption. A calibrated monetary version of the union model does quite a reasonable job in replicating the dynamic features of labour market variables observed in post-war U.S. data.     

Labor market cycles, unemployment insurance eligibility, and moral hazard

If entitlement to UI benefits must be earned with employment, generous UI is an additional benefit to working, so, by itself, it promotes job creation. If individuals are risk neutral, then there is a UI contribution scheme that eliminates any effect of UI on employment decisions. As with Ricardian Equivalence, this result should be useful to pinpoint the effects of UI to violations of its premises. Our baseline simulation shows that if the neutral contribution scheme derived in this paper were to be implemented, the average unemployment rate in the United States would fall from 5.7 to 4.7 percent. Also, the results show that with endogenous UI eligibility, one can simultaneously generate realistic productivity driven cycles and realistic responses of unemployment to changes in UI benefits.     

Debt and deficit fluctuations and the structure of bond markets

We analyse the implications of optimal taxation for the stochastic behaviour of debt. We show that when a government pursues an optimal fiscal policy under complete markets, the value of debt has the same or less persistence than other variables in the economy and it declines in response to shocks that cause the deficit to increase. By contrast, under incomplete markets debt shows more persistence than other variables and it increases in response to shocks that cause a higher deficit. Data for US government debt reveals diametrically opposite results from those of complete markets and is much more supportive of bond market incompleteness.     

The golden rule of public finance and the composition of government expenditures: a growth and welfare analysis

This paper employs an endogenous growth model to study the growth and welfare effects of the golden rule of public finance. Two versions are compared, whereby government deficits are restricted for the use of public investments. It is shown that the growth effect of the golden rule depends on what kind of expenditure is adjusted to meet debt obligations. A transition from a balanced budget to a golden rule is performed to study welfare. The results indicate that a budget rule with detrimental growth effects can still have positive welfare implications, and vice versa, if the composition of government expenditures and transitional dynamics are taken into account.     

Fiscal policy under loose commitment

Due to time-inconsistency or political turnover, policymakers' promises are not always fulfilled. We analyze an optimal fiscal policy problem where the plans made by the benevolent government are periodically revised. In this loose commitment setting, the properties of labor and capital income taxes are significantly different than under the full-commitment and no-commitment assumptions. Because of the occasional reoptimizations, the average capital income tax is positive even in the long-run. Also, the autocorrelation of taxes is lower, their volatility with respect to output increases and the correlation between capital income taxes and output changes sign. Our method can be used to analyze the plausibility and the importance of commitment in a wide-class of dynamic problems.     

Fiscal decentralization,fiscal rules and fiscal discipline

Fiscal decentralization (FD) and fiscal rules (FR) are institutional mechanisms that are implemented by varying degrees in increasing number of countries. This paper investigates empirically the effect of FR on the effectiveness of FD in achieving fiscal discipline. Panel evidence strongly supports that balanced budget and expenditure rules help FD to achieve this goal, while debt rule has a direct disciplinary effect.     

Fiscal policy over the real business cycle: A positive theory

This paper explores the implications of the political economy model of Battaglini and Coate (2008) [8] for the behavior of fiscal policy over the business cycle. The model predicts that fiscal policy is counter-cyclical with debt increasing in recessions and decreasing in booms. Public spending increases in booms and decreases during recessions, while tax rates decrease during booms and increase in recessions. In both booms and recessions, fiscal policies are set so that the marginal cost of public funds obeys a submartingale. When calibrated to the US economy, the model broadly matches the empirical distribution of debt and also its negative correlation with output. However, the predictions of pro-cyclical spending and counter-cyclical taxation do not find empirical support. The calibrated model generates the same fit of the data as a benevolent government model in which the government faces an exogenous lower bound on debt. Nonetheless, the two models have very different comparative static implications.     

Interacting nominal and real labour market rigidities

The note analyses interactions between nominal wage stickiness and costly employment adjustment under rule-based and optimal monetary policy. Policy regimes affect and optimal policy lowers the welfare cost of rigidities. No quantitatively important second-best interaction between both rigidities is found.     

Dynamic persistence in the unemployment rate of OECD countries

Previous studies use a variety of increasingly advanced unit root tests to determine whether Blanchard and Summers (1986) hysteresis theory of unemployment or the classical ‘natural’ rate theory of Friedman (1968) and Phelps (1967, 1968) is most relevant for a given country. However these tests all specify a unit root under the null hypothesis against a stationary alternative, such as in the paper by Lee and Chang (2008), making the two theories of unemployment mutually exclusive over the sample period. This paper moves away from this dichotomy by allowing for switches between hysteresis and the natural rate theory using the recently developed test of Leybourne, Kim and Taylor (2007). We find that in countries like the United Kingdom, the natural rate theory is detected in the post-World War Two period of stabilisation: the time leading up to the seminal works of Friedman and Phelps. Hysteresis is found over the First World War and Great Depression periods, and in the period from the 1970s; a time characterised by rising trade union power. We also compute numerical measures of persistence using grid-bootstrap estimates of the autoregressive parameter, following Hansen (1999).     

MACROECONOMIC AND REDISTRIBUTIONAL EFFECTS OF CONSUMPTION TAXES IN THE USA*

This paper studies the effect of an increase in consumption taxes using a dynamic general equilibrium model of overlapping generations calibrated to the US economy. When the proceeds are used to reduce income taxes, the reform raises the aggregate capital and labour supply in the long run. Workers increase labour supply immediately in response to the reform, while consumption rises only gradually. The tax reform also transfers wealth from old consumers to young consumers. As a result, while future generations experience significant welfare gains, current generations, particularly old consumers, tend to experience sizable welfare losses. When the proceeds are used for a lump‐sum transfer, the aggregate capital and labour both decrease in the long run. This reform is welfare‐improving for the current low‐income households.     

Fiscal implications of AIDS in South Africa

The number of people living with HIV is alarmingly large. In addition to the incomprehensible human suffering of those directly affected, AIDS also has large, negative economic effects. In this paper, I study the fiscal implications of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa in a standard neo-classical growth model. I find that an antiretroviral program is to a large extent self financing. Improvement in dependency ratios and health care cost savings would pay for Rand 144 billion of a full epidemiological intervention. The indirect effect through the changing demographic structure will be more important than the direct health care cost saving effect. I also explore different taxation policies. The households would be willing to sacrifice an amount equal to 12% of GDP in the first period to be subject to an optimal (Ramsey) fiscal policy rather than an alternative fixed debt to GDP policy. The optimal policy implies an increase in government debt during the peak of the epidemic.