The Okada & Samreth (2012, EL) and Asongu (2012, EB; 2013, EEL) debate on ‘the effect of foreign aid on corruption’ has had an important influence in policy and academic circles. This paper provides a unifying framework by using investment and fiscal behavior transmission channels in 53 African countries for the period 1996-2010. Findings unite the two streams of the debate and broadly suggest ...

This paper uses the old Keynesian representative agent model developed by Roger E. A. Farmer [Expectations, Employment and Prices. New York: Oxford University Press (2010)] to answer two questions: (1) Do increased government purchases crowd out private consumption? (2) Do increased government purchases reduce unemployment? Farmer compared permanent tax-financed expenditure paths and showed tha...

We provide a multiperiod model of political competition in which voters imperfectly observe the electoral promises made to other voters. Imperfect observability generates an incentive for candidates to offer excessive transfers even if voters are homogeneous and taxation is distortionary. Government spending is larger than in a world of perfect observability. Transfers are partly financed throu...

Recent fiscal policies, including the 2008 stimulus payments and the 2009 Making Work Pay Tax Credit, aimed to increase household spending. This paper quantifies the spending response to these policies and examines differences in spending by whether the stimulus was delivered as a one-time payment or as a flow of payments from reduced withholding. Based on responses from a representative sample...

We consider the implications for optimal fiscal policy when taxes are non-distortionary and households are heterogeneous and borrowing constrained. The main result is that optimal policy keeps some households borrowing constrained in order to reduce interest rates on government debt. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This paper presents a framework for assessing the fiscal condition index (FCI) and develops a concept to assess fiscal condition of governments and implements it into Iran government as an oil exporting country. The concept consists of four dimensions ­-revenue, expenditure, budget balance, and debt structure-and each dimension has its own indicators. There are seven indicators examined namely ...

Since the end of 2007, the world has experienced a sharp and deep decline in economic activity, which in this paper for the sake of brevity will be referred to as “the current recession.” The United States has initiated many costly and extensive policies to fight this recession that are likely to have detrimental effects on economic freedom in that country. This chapter considers these detrimen...

To understand the effect of fiscal policy on the private sector we have to comprehend how expectations about fiscal variables are formed. However, little is known about the way people form expectations about fiscal variables: no undercutting theory exists, not to say empirical evidence. The problem is that “expectations are unobservable” (Bertola and Drazen [BD93, p.16]). We generate observable...

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis or the Federal Reserve System.