Using a public finance approach, this study investigates welfare costs between seignorage and consumption taxes in a standard growth model. One of these two taxes is used to finance exogenous public spending to balance the government budget. The steady-state welfare cost of consumption taxes is lower if the consumption effect dominates the leisure effect. This paper compares equilibrium along t...

At odds with the large literature devoted to fiscal discipline effects of rules, only few contributions investigate their impact on public spending. Estimations based entropy balancing method reveal following causal effects: rules significantly reduce total spending and consumption, leave investment mostly unaffected, increase investment-to-public consumption ratio. Moreover, type rule countrie...

I vary the observability of a windfall payment to 294 members of agricultural clubs in rural Malawi in order to study the effect of social pressure on timing of expenditures. While other studies have documented that social pressure affects the quantity of income and consumption, I focus on timing because spending money quickly may be a strategy for reducing obligatory transfers. Such a shift in...

Using panel structural VAR analysis and quarterly data from four industrialized countries, we document that an increase in government purchases leads to an expansion in output and private consumption, a deterioration in the trade balance, and a depreciation of the real exchange rate (i.e., a decrease in the domestic CPI relative to the exchange-rate adjusted foreign CPI). We propose an explanat...

In this paper, the government consumption spending effects in a small open economy(SOE), are explored. In a standard active monetary/passive fiscal policy(AM/PF) regime, openness reduces the effectiveness of the government spending on output through the terms of trade decrease. Consumption decreases less than in the closed economy, but this effect is so weak that the output does not rise more t...

We correct the double spend race analysis given in Nakamoto’s foundational Bitcoin article and give a closed-form formula for the probability of success of a double spend attack using the Regularized Incomplete Beta Function. We give the first proof of the exponential decay on the number of confirmations and find an asymptotic formula. Larger number of confirmations are necessary compared to th...

We study the problem of preventing double spending in electronic payment schemes in a distributed fashion. This problem occurs, for instance, when the spending of electronic coins needs to be controlled by a large collection of nodes (e.g., in a peer-to-peer (P2P) system) instead of one central bank. Contrary to the commonly held belief that this is fundamentally impossible, we propose several ...

Micropayment systems are electronic payment systems that are used for very small payment and for their viability must have small transaction cost. In this paper we propose a coin-based micropayment scheme that uses a probabilistic fraud checking with distributed verification to provide an efficient solution to detect double spending by malicious customers and hence reduces the risk on the merch...

How big are government spending multipliers? A recent litererature has argued that while government spending multipliers may be small on average, they might be much larger during recessions when there is greater economic slack. However, this simple intuition ignores the significant heterogeneity of spending captured in aggregate GDP. Even if aggregate GDP responds more to fiscal shocks during r...