Fiscal-Policy

Stephie Fried

Layer 1: Overview This paper develops a macro heterogeneous-agent model to quantify the distributional welfare impacts of higher temperatures from climate change across income groups in the United …

Lukasz Rachel

Layer 1: Overview This paper builds a tractable, fully analytical version of the workhorse macro-epidemiology (“econ-epi”) model and uses it to characterize how susceptible individuals …

Marc K Chan (University of Melbourne · Tax and Transfer Policy Institute); Cain Polidano (University of Melbourne · TTPI · ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families Over the LifeCourse); Ha Vu (Deakin University · TTPI); Roger Wilkins (University of Melbourne · TTPI · IZA); Andrew Carter (Australian Taxation Office); Hang To (Australian Taxation Office)

Layer 1: Overview Governments across ten-plus countries — including Australia, the United States, Germany, and New Zealand — have introduced matching schemes to encourage low- and middle-income …

Saki Bigio (University of California · Los Angeles) · Diego R Känzig (Northwestern University) · Pablo Sánchez (Northwestern University) · Conor Walsh (Columbia University)

Layer 1: Overview This paper quantifies the sources and distributional consequences of unexpected carbon price changes for European households using a money-metric welfare framework. The motivation is …

Julien Acalin · Laurence Ball

Layer 1: Overview Research question and motivation. The fall in the US federal debt-held-by-the-public/GDP ratio from a postwar peak of 106% in fiscal year 1946 to a trough of 23% in 1974 is widely …

Philipp Hochmuth (Oesterreichische Nationalbank); Per Krusell (Stockholm University; NBER; CEPR); Kurt Mitman (Stockholm University; CEPR; CEMFI; IZA)

Layer 1: Overview This paper investigates how the EU’s Fit-for-55 climate package will affect aggregate output and distribute its costs across the income distribution. The question matters …

Eric Jondeau · Gregory Levieuge · Jean-Guillaume Sahuc · Gauthier Vermandel

Layer 1: Overview This paper asks whether public subsidies to green-technology producers, financed by a carbon tax, can materially reduce the macroeconomic cost of reaching net-zero CO2 emissions by …

Christian Bredemeier (University of Wuppertal; IZA) · Babette Jansen (University of Antwerp) · Roland Winkler (University of Antwerp; Friedrich Schiller University Jena)

Layer 1: Overview This paper proposes a novel fiscal transmission channel through which government spending expansions reduce employer monopsony power in the labor market, generating larger fiscal …

Junichi Fujimoto · David Lagakos · Mitchell VanVuren

Layer 1: Overview This paper asks whether publicly funded (“free”) secondary schooling in developing countries raises GDP per capita. The question is policy-relevant because many …

Vincenzo De Lipsis (University of Southampton; Bartlett School · UCL); Matteo Deleidi (University of Bari Aldo Moro; IIPP · UCL); Mariana Mazzucato (IIPP · UCL); Paolo Agnolucci (Bartlett School · UCL; World Bank)

Layer 1: Overview This paper estimates the dynamic macroeconomic effects of US government R&D investment using a Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) framework, with an extension to a Rational …

Nezih Guner · Christopher Rauh · Gustavo Ventura

Layer 1: Overview Guner, Rauh, and Ventura document the scope, generosity, distributional impact, and time evolution of means-tested transfers to working-age US households, and provide parametric …

Christiaan van der Kwaak (University of Groningen)

Layer 1: Overview When central banks pay interest on reserves — as the Federal Reserve has done since October 2008 and as is standard operating procedure today — does financing fiscal stimulus by …

Tuo Chen · Chang-Tai Hsieh · Zheng (Michael) Song

Layer 1: Overview Chen, Hsieh, and Song study the use of unofficial non-tariff barriers (NTBs) by China during the U.S.-China trade war of 2018–2019 and in the first year of the Phase 1 purchase …

Thomas Douenne (University of Amsterdam); Albert Jan Hummel (University of Groningen); Marcelo Pedroni (Inter-American Development Bank; University of Amsterdam)

Layer 1: Overview This paper asks whether inequality and redistributive taxation should make climate policy more or less ambitious, and how optimal carbon taxes interact with optimal income taxes when …

Andrés Fernández · Daniel Guzman · Ruy Lama · Carlos Végh

Layer 1: Overview Developing and emerging economies exhibit procyclical fiscal policy on both the spending and taxation sides: government expenditures expand in booms and contract in recessions, and …

Weizheng Lai · Lixin Colin Xu · Li Yang

Layer 1: Overview Research question and motivation: How do civil wars affect long-term development, and through which institutional mechanisms? The paper studies the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) in …

Scott French · Tess M. Stafford

Layer 1: Overview Research question and motivation: A large empirical literature uses micro data to estimate the intertemporal elasticity of substitution (IES) of labor supply, a parameter crucial for …

Sushant Acharya · Jess Benhabib

Layer 1: Overview Research question and motivation: A central tenet of monetary policy is that aggressively raising nominal rates more than one-for-one with inflation (the Taylor principle) nips …

Sjak Smulders · Sophie Zhou

Layer 1: Overview This paper by Smulders and Zhou challenges the standard lock-in narrative for the slow green transition. The conventional explanation — path dependency in directed technical change …

Sakai Ando · Tamon Asonuma · Prachi Mishra · Alexandre Sollaci

Layer 1: Overview Sovereign debt restructuring is a central tool for countries in debt distress, yet surprisingly little evidence exists on whether it actually reduces the debt-to-GDP ratio — the …

Hans A. Holter · Serhiy Stepanchuk · Yicheng Wang

Layer 1: Overview This paper investigates how the level and progressivity of personal income taxes shape entrepreneurial activity in the United States, contributing empirical evidence, theoretical …

Unknown

Layer 1: Overview Barro and Chari (2024) revisit the long-standing debate over optimal capital income taxation, unifying the Chamley-Judd zero-tax result, the Straub-Werning positive-tax amendment, …

Katrine Jakobsen · Henrik Kleven · Jonas Kolsrud · Camille Landais · Mathilde Munoz

Layer 1: Overview Research question and motivation: Proposals to tax top wealth (e.g., Saez and Zucman, 2019) face a recurring objection in public debate: that the wealthy will emigrate en masse and, …

Alessandra Fenizia (The George Washington University) · Nicholas Li (The George Washington University) · Luca Citino (Bank of Italy)

Layer 1: Overview This paper studies the cost-effectiveness of targeted payroll tax reductions as a tool for stimulating labor demand among marginalized workers, using a natural experiment from Italy. …

Patrick J. Kennedy · Christine L. Dobridge · Paul Landefeld · Jacob Mortenson

Layer 1: Overview This paper estimates the firm- and worker-level effects of the corporate income tax cuts in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) — the largest corporate tax cut in U.S. history — to …

Maximilian Konradt (Imperial College London); Giacomo Mangiante (Bank of Italy)

Layer 1: Overview This paper asks whether carbon pricing through the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) imposes economic costs that are unequally distributed across European regions, and whether …

Thomas Bourany (Columbia University · USA) · Jordan Rosenthal-Kay (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco · USA)

Layer 1: Overview This paper asks who wins and loses from climate policies — carbon taxes, renewable subsidies, and carbon tariffs — across 193 heterogeneous countries, and by how much. The motivation …

Titan Alon · Damien Capelle · Kazushige Matsuda

Layer 1: Overview This paper proposes that university R&D is determined endogenously by competition for tuition and talented students in the market for higher education, and asks why universities …

Maria Alsina-Pujols

Layer 1: Overview This paper asks how the threat of forced climate migration — international displacement driven by climate-induced natural disasters — should alter optimal carbon taxation. The …

Christiaan van der Kwaak · Sweder van Wijnbergen

Layer 1: Overview Research question and motivation: Does fiscal stimulus still work when it is financed through a banking system that is undercapitalized and holds large quantities of risky domestic …

Hiona Balfoussia · Harris Dellas · Dimitris Papageorgiou

Layer 1: Overview This paper studies a transmission channel from sovereign fiscal weakness to banking performance that the literature has largely overlooked: government-provided deposit insurance, …

Marc Folch · Luca Mazzone

Layer 1: Overview Research question and motivation: Folch and Mazzone ask how undergraduate student debt shapes three intertwined post-college decisions — whether to pursue a post-bachelor (graduate) …

Unknown

Layer 1: Overview Research question and motivation: The paper asks whether and why the type of employment — specifically public-sector employment — affects household saving rates in China. This …

Christoph Hambel · Frederick van der Ploeg

Layer 1: Overview Research question and motivation: Central bankers, regulators, and investors increasingly worry about climate “transition risks” — abrupt shifts in climate policy, green …

Unknown

Layer 1: Overview Hasanhodzic and Kotlikoff ask a question prior work assumed away: how large is generational risk, and can pay-go Social Security actually mitigate it? Earlier studies (Diamond, Bohn, …

Sebastian Graves · Victoria Gregory · Lars Ljungqvist · Thomas J. Sargent

Layer 1: Overview Research question and motivation: How does endogenizing retirement (career-length) choice change the labor-supply and human-capital implications of the canonical Heckman, Lochner, …

Ricardo Duque Gabriel

Layer 1: Overview Research question and motivation. Public procurement accounts for roughly one-third of government spending (12.6% of GDP and 30% of total government expenditures in OECD countries in …

Filippo Pallotti · Gonzalo Paz-Pardo · Jiri Slacalek · Oreste Tristani · Giovanni L. Violante

Layer 1: Overview This paper measures the heterogeneous first-order welfare effects of the 2021-2023 inflation surge across households in the four largest euro area countries (Germany, France, Italy, …

Marco Bassetto · David S Miller

Overview Research Question. Why do sudden inflations and currency crises occur, while symmetric sudden deflations never do? The paper asks whether treating nominal government bonds as analogous to …

Rüdiger Bachmann · Benjamin Born · Olga Goldfayn-Frank · Georgi Kocharkov · Ralph Luetticke · Michael Weber

The paper studies Germany’s temporary 3 percentage-point VAT cut from July 1 to December 31, 2020 (standard rate 19%→16%, reduced rate 7%→5%), combining two causal identification strategies with …

Robert W. Hahn · Nathaniel Hendren · Robert D. Metcalfe · Ben Sprung-Keyser

This paper extends and applies the marginal value of public funds (MVPF) framework to evaluate the welfare consequences of 96 climate-related tax and spending policies in the United States. The MVPF …

Minsu Chang · Hanbaek Lee

Layer 1 — Overview Research Question This paper investigates the fiscal multiplier of infrastructure investment, specifically by incorporating firm-level investment decisions — a dimension absent from …

Farid Farrokhi · Ahmad Lashkaripour

Overview Farrokhi and Lashkaripour (2025) study the interaction between trade policy and climate change. The central research question is whether and how countries can use trade policy — specifically …

Robert M. Anderson · Haosui Duanmu

Layer 1 — Overview Research Question Anderson and Duanmu (2025) ask how general equilibrium (GE) interactions — factor reallocation across sectors, capital misallocation under climate uncertainty, and …

Jonathan Payne · Bálint Szőke · George Hall · Thomas J Sargent

Overview This paper constructs a new dataset of US federal bond prices and uses it to estimate the full term structure of yields on gold-denominated US federal debt from 1791 to 1933 — the entire gold …

Victor Chernozhukov · Kaspar Wuthrich · Yinchu Zhu

Chernozhukov, Wüthrich, and Zhu propose a debiased synthetic control (SC) estimator and an accompanying self-normalized t-test for making inferences on the average treatment effect on the treated …

Alan J Auerbach · Yuriy Gorodnichenko · Daniel Murphy

This paper estimates the distributional and social consequences of Department of Defense (DOD) contract spending using a city-level (CBSA) panel dataset spanning 2005–2016. The research question is …

Anastasiia Antonova · Gernot J. Müller

This paper asks how governments should optimally adjust sector-specific taxes in response to sectoral shocks when monetary policy cannot be tailored to individual sectors. The authors work within a …

John Sturm Becko · André Sztutman

Overview Research Question. Can income tax schedules be justified as utilitarian-optimal without adopting extreme normative assumptions about how household welfare should be measured? The paper …

Thomas R Covert · Ryan Kellogg

Covert and Kellogg study policies that aim to “keep carbon in the ground” by blocking fossil fuel infrastructure investment, with the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) as their empirical …

Xincheng Qiu · Nicoló Russo

The paper provides the most comprehensive cross-country empirical characterisation of effective income tax functions to date, estimating the two-parameter log-linear tax function — pioneered by …

Kai Gehring · Paul Schaudt

This paper provides quasi-experimental evidence that Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) — a remote-sensing-triggered, automated payout scheme for pastoralists — substantially reduces …

Guillermo A. Calvo · Andrés Velasco

Layer 1 — What this paper finds and why it matters Calvo and Velasco study an economy where both money and government bonds provide liquidity services, and they show that this shared role implies …

Daniel Lewis · Davide Melcangi · Laura Pilossoph

Lewis, Melcangi, and Pilossoph estimate the unconditional distribution of the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) using the 2008 Economic Stimulus Act (ESA) rebate payments, deploying Gaussian …

KOZO UEDA

Layer 1 — Overview Research Question. This paper asks whether heterogeneity in the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) stems from temporary circumstances (e.g., transient wealth shocks that tighten …

Jacob D Orchard · Valerie A Ramey · Johannes F Wieland

Layer 1 — Overview Research question. Do the high marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) estimated in the leading household studies of the 2008 U.S. tax rebates—particularly Parker et al. (2013), …

Sebastian Schmidt

The paper builds a discrete-time DSGE model with Calvo sticky prices in which the public sector has two feedback rules that can hit corners, generating endogenous shifts between an …

Jan Eeckhout · Chunyang Fu · Wenjian Li · Xi Weng

Overview This paper asks whether and how optimal income taxation should change when firms have market power. The question is motivated by the documented rise in economy-wide markups since 1980, which …

Beat Hintermann · Beaumont Schoeman · Joseph Molloy · Thomas Götschi · Alberto Castro · Christopher Tchervenkov · Uros Tomic · Kay W Axhausen

This paper reports on the MOBIS experiment, a large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) implementing a multi-modal Pigovian transport pricing scheme in urban areas of German- and French-speaking …

Stefano DellaVigna · Woojin Kim

DellaVigna and Kim study the innovation and diffusion of policies across U.S. states using a dataset of over 700 state laws spanning seven decades. The central question is what predicts whether a …

Peter Maxted · David Laibson · Benjamin Moll

Layer 1 — Summary Maxted, Laibson, and Moll study fiscal and monetary policy in a partial-equilibrium heterogeneous-agent model in which homeowners have present-biased time preferences (Instantaneous …

Lassi Ahlvik · Jørgen Juel Andersen · Jonas Hveding Hamang · Torfinn Harding

This paper asks three questions about supply-side climate policies in the oil market: how do oil companies respond to production-based taxes; what are the aggregate effects of such taxes on global CO2 …

Ojasvita Bahl · Chetan Ghate · Debdulal Mallick

Layer 1 — What this paper finds and why it matters Governments in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) routinely intervene in agricultural markets — procuring grain and redistributing it …

Andrew B. Abel · Stavros Panageas

Running Primary Deficits Forever in a Dynamically Efficient Economy: Feasibility and Optimality Research Question The paper addresses two questions about government debt rollover. First, a positive …

Oleg Itskhoki · Dmitry Mukhin

Layer 1 — Core Argument Itskhoki and Mukhin develop a tractable open-economy model with financial market segmentation — in which only the government sector (including state banks and exporting firms) …

François Le Grand · Alaïs Martin-Baillon · Xavier Ragot

Layer 1 — Overview Research Question. Should monetary policy deviate from price stability to address redistributive concerns in an economy with heterogeneous agents? The paper jointly solves for …

Xiaoming Li · Zheng Liu · Yuchao Peng · Zhiwei Xu

Layer 1 — Overview Research Question This paper asks how changes in the composition (not the size) of Chinese local government debt influence bank risk-taking, credit allocation between privately …

Luigi Iovino · Thorsten Martin · Julien Sauvagnat

This paper documents and quantifies an “environmental bias” embedded in the U.S. corporate income tax code: CO2-intensive (“dirty”) firms systematically face lower effective …

Lu Han · L. Rachel Ngai · Kevin D. Sheedy

Layer 1 — Summary Using sales and leasing transaction records for the Greater Toronto Area (2006–2018), this paper finds three novel effects of a higher property transaction tax: higher buy-to-rent …

Daniel Björkegren · Joshua E Blumenstock · Samsun Knight

This paper asks a fundamental question about policy design: when a program prioritizes one group over another, is that because the group benefits more from the intervention, or because the policy …

Barbara Biasi · Julien Lafortune · David Schönholzer

What Works and for Whom? Effectiveness and Efficiency of School Capital Investments Across the U.S. Research Question This paper investigates which types of school facility investments benefit …