The standard theory of tax smoothing says that the government runs a deficit to finance investment projects with a market rate of return and temporary high levels of public consumption. Taxes are used to finance permanent spending and losses on public investment. Deficit financing is used to offset some of the short-run costs of structural reforms. A prudent government deliberately downplays ex...

This paper proposes a theory of optimal public expenditure when unemployment is inefficient. The theory is based on a matching model. Optimal public expenditure deviates from the Samuelson rule to reduce the unemployment gap (the gap between the current and efficient rates of unemployment). Such optimal “stimulus spending” is described by a formula expressed with estimable sufficient statistics...

Do voters effectively hold elected officials accountable for policy decisions? Using data on natural disasters, government spending, and election returns, we show that voters reward the incumbent presidential party for delivering disaster relief spending, but not for investing in disaster preparedness spending. These inconsistencies distort the incentives of public officials, leading the govern...

Health spending per capita in England has more than doubled since 1997, yet relatively little is known about how that spending is distributed across the population. This paper uses administrative National Health Service (NHS) hospital records to examine key features of public hospital spending in England. We describe how costs vary across the lifecycle, and the concentration of spending among p...

Biopharmaceuticals, mainly monoclonal antibodies, and fusion proteins are drugs that have gained notoriety in the treatment of various chronic inflammatory diseases high prices. The study aimed to verify which antibodies were most incorporated into Unified Health System (SUS), therapeutic indication benefited from them analyze public spending on these biopharmaceuticals January 2012 September 2...