Through independence the Scottish Government aims to reverse many of the UK Government’s welfare reforms, and at the same time, reform the welfare system so that it improves the transition into work. There is an apparent trade-off between the desire to increase redistribution and improve work incentives. However, because different groups respond differently to particular incentives inherent in ...

Recent work has provided compelling evidence of a long-term decline in US female labor supply elasticities with respect to wages and to income. While previous work used crosssectional data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), we reexamine the trend for married women using panel data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) from 1980 to 2006. We find evidence in support of a long-term...

iv Preface The African Development Bank (AfDB) has partnered with the African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF) and the East African Secretariat on a project aimed at sharing lessons of experience from Domestic Resource Mobilization (DRM) though case studies for the East African Community partner states (EAC), South Africa and South Korea. For the purposes of this work, DRM is defined to include ...

In this paper we study the effects of reforms to corporate and personal income taxation on the rate of firm entry and exit using industry data for 19 OECD countries from 1998 to 2005. Using a difference-in-differences approach to correct for endogeneity bias we find that increases in corporate taxation affect entry but not exit. This drop in entry is statistically and economically significant, ...

Employment, Hours of Work and the Optimal Taxation of Low Income Families The optimal design of low income support is examined using a structural labour supply model. The approach incorporates unobserved heterogeneity, fixed costs of work, childcare costs and the detailed non-convexities of the tax and transfer system. The analysis considers purely Pareto improving reforms and also optimal desi...

Article history: Received 29 June 2013 Received in revised form 18 November 2013 Accepted 19 November 2013 Available online 12 December 2013 Constructing a duopoly model with non-constant marginal costs and a strict Pareto criterion, this paper examines welfare effects of world-price-fixing tariff reductions accompanied by adjustments of a domestic tax. If a destination-based consumption tax is...

This paper utilizes a micro data set on consumer durables to study the effect of consumption tax reforms on the time path of consumption. The dataset reports the monthly sales of individual products and their consumer prices in 22 European countries, which enacted numerous consumption tax reforms in recent years. We implement a reduced form specification for sales that allows us to test theoret...

This dissertation consists of three essays which investigate the economic implications of monetary and fiscal policies on the macroeconomy. The first essay focuses on the following question: how can we explain the observed behavior of aggregate inflation in response to e.g. monetary policy changes? Mankiw and Reis (2002) have proposed sticky information as an alternative to Calvo sticky prices ...