the macroeconomic impact of financial fragmentation in the euro area which role for credit supply this paper studies the macroeconomic impact of financial fragmentation in the euro area by analysing the role of credit supply shocks during the recent pre crisis bust and post crisis periods we estimate a time varying parameter vector autoregression tvp var with stochastic volatility a la primiceri 2005 for euro area countries and we identify the structural shocks by imposing sign restrictions on impulse response functions based on the theoretical model by gerali et al 2010 the results suggest that credit supply shocks have been an important driver of business cycle fluctuations in euro area countries and that their effects on the economy have generally increased since the recent crisis more specifically we find evidence that credit supply shocks contributed positively to output growth during the pre crisis period and negatively during the downturn in economic activity in 2008 2009 in all the countries considered in the post crisis period by contrast we observe a strong rise in cross country heterogeneity reflecting financial fragmentation in the euro area associated with the sovereign debt crisis and weaker banks balance sheets although this heterogeneity across euro area countries started to decline around 2012 the contribution of credit supply shocks to gdp growth and credit growth remained negative in most euro area countries in mid 2013 the end of our sample suggesting that constraints in the supply of credit continued to weaken economic activity

taxation with costly administration the concept of a tax technology is used here as providing a unified framework for analyzing both administrative activity by tax authorities and tax resisting activity by taxpayers this framework provides a simple formalization of adam smith s four components of tax costs administration substitution active noncompliance and passive compliance the model is used to derive policy implications concerning the proper measurement of the cost of public funds and concerning the criterion for optimal administration

does the worldwide shift of fdi from manufacturing to services accelerate economic growth a gmm estimation study abstract we examine the effect of manufacturing and service fdi foreign direct investment on their own sector growth the spillover to the other sectors and the overall economy in host countries we identify significant sectoral and inter industry spillover effects with various data classifications and types of fdi flows evidence reveals that growth effect of manufacturing fdi operates by stimulating activity in its own manufacturing sector and is prevalent in latin america caribbean in europe central asia middle to low income countries and economies with large industry share a surge of service fdi is likely to spur growth in service industries but hurt activity in manufacturing industries financial service fdi enhances growth in south east asia and the pacific high income countries and service based economies by stimulating activity in both manufacturing and service sectors however nonfinancial service fdi drains resources and hurts manufacturing industry in the same group of countries we conclude that a shift from manufacturing to service fdi is likely to lead to deindustrialization in certain regions and types of economies if this shift is spearheaded by nonfinancial fdi

the optimal elasticity of taxable income abstract the strength of the behavioral response to a tax rate change depends on the environment individuals operate in and may be manipulated by instruments controlled by the government we first derive a measure of the social benefit to affecting this elasticity the paper then examines this effect in the solution to the optimal income taxation problem when such an instrument is available first in a general model and then in an example when the government chooses the income tax base

tax evasion and the optimum general income tax abstract this paper incorporates tax evasion into an optimum general income tax problem with endogenous labor supply it posits a two group model with high and low wage individuals to investigate the properties of optimal audit and tax structures the following main results are obtained first high wage persons are never audited while low wage persons are audited with a probability strictly less than one secondly high wage persons should face a zero marginal tax rate thirdly low wage individuals who have been audited and found innocent should pay a lower tax than those who are not audited fourthly there are two possible tax regimes low wage persons face a positive marginal tax rate under one regime and a zero rate under the other fifthly even if honesty cannot be rewarded the other results of the paper continue to hold

lenders on the storm of wholesale funding shocks saved by the central bank abstractwe provide empirical evidence on banks responses to shocks in the wholesale funding market using data of 181 euro area banks over the period from august 2007 to june 2013 responses to funding liquidity shocks for both banks lending volumes and loan rates to households and corporates are analysed in a panel var framework we thereby distinguish banks by country extent of eurosystem borrowing bank size and capitalization the results show that shocks in the securities and interbank markets have significant effects on loan rates and credit supply particularly of banks in stressed countries of the periphery the results also suggest that central bank liquidity has mitigated this effect on lending volumes lending to nonfinancial corporations is more sensitive to wholesale funding shocks than lending to households lending volumes of large banks that are typically more dependent on wholesale funding and banks with large exposure to sovereign bonds show stronger responses to wholesale funding s

on the optimal tax base for commodity taxation taxed considerable effort has been devoted to characterizing the manner in which the optimal tax rates differ across the taxable commodities but the literature has rarely addressed the issue of which commodities should be included in the tax base in fact the standard optimal tax model cannot provide a useful answer to this question because it does not contain any of the resource costs normally associated with the collection of taxes an omission that seriously diminishes the policy relevance of the model 2

the effect of marginal tax rates on taxable income a panel study of the 1986 tax reform act this paper uses a treasury department panel of more than 4 000 taxpayers to estimate the sensitivity of taxable income to changes in tax rates on the basis of a comparison of the tax returns of the same individual taxpayers before and after the 1986 tax reform the analysis emphasizes that the response of taxable income involves much more than a change in the traditional measures of labor supply the evidence shows an elasticity of taxable income with respect to the marginal net of tax rate that is at least one and could be substantially higher the implications for recent tax rate changes are discussed

optimal taxation with costly enforcement and evasion abstract this paper analyzes the relationship between optimal taxation and optimal tax enforcement a central question concerns the extent to which revenue should be raised through higher tax rates which distort behavior or greater enforcement which distorts behavior and also entails direct resource costs in the models examined some expenditure on enforcement may be optimal despite its resource cost its distortionary effect and the availability of other revenue sources having no enforcement costs rules for optimal tax rates and enforcement expenditures are derived which also indicate the marginal cost of government funds and optimal enforcement priorities for a tax collection agency

the transmission mechanism of credit support policies in the euro area abstract we use an original monthly dataset of 131 banks to examine the effectiveness and transmission mechanism of the eurosystem s credit support policies in the wake of the banking and sovereign debt crisis first we show that these policies were indeed succesful in stimulating the credit flow of banks to the private sector second we find support for the bank lending view of monetary transmission specifically the policies had a greater impact on loan supply of banks that were more constrained to obtain unsecured external funding i e small banks size effect banks with less liquid balance sheets liquidity effect banks that depended more on wholesale funding retail effect and low capitalized banks capital effect the role of bank capital was however ambiguous besides the above favorable direct effect on loan supply lower levels of bank capitalization at the same time mitigated the size retail and liquidity effects of the policies the drag on the other channels was even dominant i e better capitalized banks responded on average more to the credit support policies of the eurosystem as a result of more favourable size retail and liquidity effects

the effect of income taxes on household income research on the distribution of income during the 1980s has identified a trend towards increasing inequality which may be the continuation and acceleration of trends spanning several decades this paper explores to what extent behavioral responses to the tax changes during the 1980s may also explain the rising inequality the 1986 tax reform act is used as a natural experiment to explore the roles played by both taxes and a variety of nontax factors our principal finding is that both tax rates and nontax factors appear to have had significant effects on relative income growth during the late 1980s

the ecb and the interbank market this paper analyses the impact on the macroeconomy of the ecb s non standard monetary policy implemented in the aftermath of the collapse of lehman brothers in the fall of 2008 we study in particular the effect of the expansion of the intermediation of transactions across central bank balance sheets as dysfunctional financial markets seize up which we regard as a key channel of transmission for non standard monetary policy measures our approach is similar to lenza et al 2009 but we introduce the important innovation of distinguishing between private intermediation of interbank transactions in the money market and central bank intermediation of bank to bank transactions across the eurosystem balance sheet we do this by exploiting data drawn from the aggregate monetary and financial institutions mfi balance sheet which allows us to construct a new measure of the policy shock represented by the ecb s increasing role as a financial intermediary we find that bank loans to households and in particular to non financial corporations are higher than would have been the case without the ecb s intervention in turn the ecb s support has a significant impact on economic activity two and a half years after the failure of lehman brothers the level of industrial production is estimated to be 2 higher and the unemployment rate 0 6 percentage points lower than would have been the case in the absence of the ecb s non standard monetary policy measures

interbank liquidity crunch and the firm credit crunch evidence from the 2007 2009 crisis we study the credit supply effects of the unexpected freeze of the european interbank market using exhaustive portuguese loan level data we find that banks that rely more on interbank borrowing before the crisis decrease their credit supply more during the crisis the credit supply reduction is stronger for firms that are smaller with weaker banking relationships small firms cannot compensate the credit crunch with other sources of debt furthermore the impact of illiquidity on the credit crunch is stronger for less solvent banks finally we find no overall positive effects of central bank liquidity but instead higher hoarding of liquidity

tax evasion concealment and the optimal linear income tax this paper incorporates tax evasion into the analysis of optimal linear income taxation taxevaders can influence the probability of being caught if audited through expenditures on concealment it is proved that tax evasion can make a given tax system more as well as less progressive depending on the concealment technology the paper derives and interprets simple formulas for characterizing the optimal tax rate and audit probability it also gives sufficient conditions under which tax evasion lowers the optimal tax rate while showing that an increase in the optimal tax rate is also possible

tax avoidance and the deadweight loss of the income tax traditional analyses of the income tax greatly underestimate deadweight losses by ignoring its effect on forms of compensation and patterns of consumption the full deadweight loss is easily calculated using the compensated elasticity of taxable income to changes in tax rates because leisure excludable income and deductible consumption are a hicksian composite good microeconomic estimates imply a deadweight loss of as much as 30 of revenue or more than ten times harberger s classic 1964 estimate the relative deadweight loss caused by increasing existing tax rates is substantially greater and may exceed 2 per 1 of revenue

fixing the leak in okun s bucket optimal tax progressivity when avoidance can be controlled this paper examines optimal income tax progressivity when avoidance responses to taxation are important and can be controlled at some cost by the government a simple example shows that ignoring the fact that avoidance can be controlled that the leak in okun s bucket can be fixed can lead to misleading implications about the optimal degree of tax rate progressivity the paper then generalizes the standard modei of the optimal linear income tax to include taxpayer avoidance behavior and the ability of government to control the avoidance but not the labor supply response to higher marginal tax ites the discussion suggests that if the tax burden is to be made more progressive base broadening and increased enforcement ought to be considered as alternatives or complements to increasing tax rates for high income individuals

heterogeneous transmission mechanism monetary policy and financial fragility in the eurozone the eurozone economic activity and banking sector have shown substantial fragility over the last years with remarkable country heterogeneity using detailed data on lending conditions and standards we analyse along several key dimensions of heterogeneity how financial fragility has affected the transmission mechanism of the single eurozone monetary policy the analysis shows that the monetary transmission mechanism is time varying and influenced by the financial fragility of the sovereigns banks firms and households the impact of monetary policy on aggregate output is stronger during the financial crisis especially in countries facing increased sovereign financial distress this amplification mechanism moreover operates through the credit channel both the bank lending and the non financial borrower balance sheet channels our results suggest that the bank lending channel has been to a large extent neutralized by the ecb non standard monetary policy interventions but the policy framework until the end of 2011 was insufficient to overcome credit availability problems stemming from deteriorated firm net worth and risk conditions especially for small firms in countries under stress matteo ciccarelli angela maddaloni and jose luis peydro

tax evasion and optimal commodity taxation abstract this paper incorporates tax evasion into ramsey s optimal taxation problem it provides i a precise and intuitive characterization of the tradeoff between optimal tax rates and audit probabilities and ii a modified version of the ramsey equation it also proves that in the presence of tax evasion a the well known requirement of proportional reduction in compensated demands b the traditional result on the optimality of uniform taxation when income is exogenous and c the equivalence of wage and uniform commodity taxes are no longer valid

liquidity shortages and banking crises we show in this article that bank failures can be contagious unlike earlier work where contagion stems from depositor panics or contractual links between banks we argue that bank failures can shrink the common pool of liquidity creating or exacerbating aggregate liquidity shortages this could lead to a contagion of failures and a total meltdown of the system given the costs of a meltdown there is a possible role for government intervention unfortunately liquidity and solvency problems interact and can cause each other making it hard to determine the cause of a crisis we propose a robust sequence of intervention banks are often found at the center of systemic financial crises the causes of these crises have long been debated do they stem from depositor panics or do they arise because bank balance sheets are exposed to common factors if it is the latter then is there any sense in which bank failures can be contagious can anything be done to prevent these crises or stop them from propagating once they begin our purpose in this paper is to reexamine whether bank failures can start and propagate systemic crises even if we assume that depositors do not panic that is even if depositors actions are coordinated and they do not run simply because they fear others will run our focus is not because we think that panics are empirically unimportant the jury is still out on that instead we show that contagion can stem from an underlying real general equilibrium problem rather than just from lack of coordination among depositors from a policy perspective attempts to reassure investors through confidence building measures will not work if panic and lack of coordination are not the reasons for a crisis we begin in this paper with a model of a bank that we developed in diamond and rajan 2001 assets in this model are illiquid they cannot be borrowed against or sold for the full value of resources they will generate in their best use because the human capital necessary to generate that full value cannot

economics for the future many of us decided to study economics because we were interested in issues such aseconomic growth unemployment poverty discrimination and social exclusion andfor much of the history of the discipline economists grappled with explaining suchphenomena and hopefully helped to improve the development of economic policy but now the discipline is increasingly dominated by other concerns such asmathematical rigour and econometric modelling the new york times columnist michael weinstein recalled how his passion to learn economics which was driven bya desire to understand the causes of poverty and the impact of technical change wasimmediately quelled when on his rst day as a graduate student at the massachusettsinstitute of technology the professor announced that all of economics is a subset ofthe theory of separating hyperplans weinstein 2000 the subject has become soobscure that even orthodox economists are bemoaning its intellectual poverty accordingtomiltonfriedman economicshasbecomeincreasinglyanarcanebranchof mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems friedman 1999 p 137 and robert solow has observed today if you ask a mainstream economista question about almost any aspect of economic life the response will be suppose wemodel that situation and see what happens modern mainstream economics consistsof little else but examples of this process quoted in lawson 2005 so many economists are now increasingly engaged in research and teaching that isdisconnected from the issues that in uence people s lives as long 2005 observed academiceconomistsremainhiddenintheirivorytowers theyareneitherhouseholdnames nor a signi cant presence in newspaper commentary pages how strange fora country that produced the most famous economists of all time adam smith davidricardo and john maynard keynes but not all remain hidden in their ivory towers there are a few who do in uence the policy domain but they come from the intel lectually narrow sect of neoclassical economics and there are those from the neo classical sect who have managed to in ltrate popular culture by throwing away themaths packaging their prose in airport style books and entertaining their readerswithstories about why sumo wrestlers cheat and why drug pushers live with their mums see levitt and dubner 2005 as modern orthodox economics moves away from reality there is both theopportunity and the need for heterodox economics to orientate economics towards

reduced cross border lending and financing costs of smes abstract this paper investigates how the withdrawal of banks from their cross border business impacted the borrowing costs of european firms since the crisis we combine aggregate information on total and cross border credit with firm level survey data for the period 2010 2014 we find that the decline in cross border lending led to a deterioration in the borrowing conditions of small firms in countries with more pronounced reductions in cross border credit inflows the likelihood of a rise in firms external financing costs increased this result is mainly driven by the interbank channel which plays a crucial role in transmitting shocks to the real sector across borders