Public Education Spending, Sectoral Taxation, and Growth

Schumpeterian Growth with Productive Public Spending and Distortionary Taxation

The latest version of Schumpeterian growth theory eliminates the scale effect by positing a process of development of new product lines that fragments the aggregate market in submarkets whose size does not increase with population. A key feature of this process is the sterilization of the effect of the size of the aggregate market on firms’ incentives to invest in the growth of a given product ...

Education, sectoral composition, and growth

Article history: Received 23 June 2006 Revised 29 July 2008 Available online 5 August 2008 JEL classification: O2 O3 I2

Property taxation and local public spending: the renter effect

The point of departure for this study is the pervasive finding that, other things equal, local jurisdictions tend to spend more on local services the larger the fraction of renters among their residents. This paper seeks to determine the approximate magnitude of this “renter effect” by posing the question “How much smaller would local public budgets be if all residents were home-owners?” Making...

A Dynamic Theory of Public Spending, Taxation, and Debt

This paper presents a dynamic political economy theory of public spending, taxation, and debt. The theory builds on the well-known tax smoothing approach to fiscal policy pioneered by Robert Barro (1979). This approach predicts that governments will use budget surpluses and deficits as a buffer to prevent tax rates from changing too sharply. Thus, governments will run deficits in times of high ...

Taxation and Capital Spending