Publications

Governments Should Use Tax Systems to Drive Inclusive Growth Agenda

and | 22 July 2016
Fiscal, Blog | Tags: Inequality, Tax Expenditures, Taxes
Tax policy design should play a key role in not only supporting growth but also in addressing distributional concerns. Taxes affect inequality through different channels. The most direct way in which taxes redistribute income is by narrowing the distribution of (post-tax) disposable income. Taxes can ... continue reading

Are Tax Expenditures a Good Way to Redistribute?

| 1 July 2016
Fiscal, Blog | Tags: Inequality, Tax Expenditures, Taxes
Since 2007, governments across several European countries have implemented cuts to their social programs in an attempt to tackle the fiscal deficits generated by the last economic and financial crisis. At the same time, they have increasingly made use of various tax related measures to ... continue reading

Central Banking and Inequality – Taking Off the Blinders

, and | 16 June 2016
Monetary, Blog | Tags: Central Banks, Ethics, Inequality
Since the financial crisis, the relative importance of monetary policy in the toolbox of macroeconomic policies has increased. In parallel, we have seen a renewed social and political concern with rising inequalities in income and wealth. However, the two trends are rarely connected.[1] Despite studies ... continue reading

Measuring and Understanding Trade in Service Tasks

, and | 24 May 2016
Trade, Discussion Notes | Tags: Employment, Services Trade
Improvements in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have had differential impacts on the costs of offshoring service tasks. As a result, services with stronger tradability characteristics are at a higher risk of being offshored. This has increased the need for coming up with proper measures ... continue reading

Energy Subsidies – Widespread, Significant, and Largely Not Reaching the Poor

| 18 April 2016
Fiscal, Blog | Tags: Energy, Inequality, Subsidies
Energy subsidies are widespread and significant. In 2014, according to the IEA (2015), government support for global fossil fuel consumption amounted to 490 billion US$. An IMF working paper (Coady et al., 2015) reports even higher numbers. Distinguishing between subsidies before (pre) and after (post) ... continue reading

Multinational tax avoidance in developing countries

, and | 7 April 2016
Fiscal, Blog | Tags: Corporate Taxes, Development, Tax Avoidance
In recent years many global firms—including Starbucks, Google, and Amazon—have come under fire for avoiding paying taxes in one country by shifting their profits to a country with lower tax rates. ... continue reading

Finance, Growth and Inequality

and | 31 March 2016
Fiscal, Monetary, Blog | Tags: Financial Markets, Inequality
Finance is the lifeblood of modern economies, but too much of the wrong type of finance can hamper economic prosperity and social cohesion. We have taken a holistic approach to study the consequences of finance for the inclusiveness of growth, in the spirit of the ... continue reading

Monetary Policy According to HANK

, and | 10 March 2016
Monetary, Research Papers | Tags: Inequality, Interest Rates
We revisit the transmission mechanism of monetary policy for household consumption in a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) model. The model yields empirically realistic distributions of household wealth and marginal propensities to consume because of two key features: multiple assets with different degrees of liquidity ... continue reading

Trade and Employment. An Overview

| 29 February 2016
Trade, Discussion Notes | Tags: Employment
The bulk of economic research on the impacts of trade has for a long time neglected aggregate effects on jobs. While research grants an important role of trade for employment, empirical studies often struggle to attribute employment outcomes to trade policies in the long run. ... continue reading

The Transmission of Monetary Policy through Redistributions and Durable Purchases

and | 19 January 2016
Monetary, Research Papers | Tags: Inequality, Lump-Sum Transfers, Sector Bias
This paper studies a redistribution channel for the transmission of monetary policy. Using a tractable OLG setting ... continue reading