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Working Paper
Endogenous Political Turnover and Fluctuations in Sovereign Default Risk
A sovereign default model in which the sovereign derives private benefits from public office and contests elections to stay in power is developed. The economy?s growth process is modeled as a Markov switching regime, which is shown to be a better description of the data for our set of emerging economies. In the model, consistent with evidence, the sovereign is less likely to be reelected if economic growth is weak. In the low-growth regime, there is higher probability of loss of private benefits due to turnover, which makes the sovereign behave more myopically. This growth-linked variation in ...
Working Paper
Did the 2017 Tax Reform Discriminate against Blue State Voters?
The Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) made significant changes to corporate and personal federal income taxation, including limiting the SALT (state and local property, income and sales taxes) deductibility to $10,000. States with high SALT tend to vote Democratic. This paper estimates the differential effect of the TCJA on red- and blue-state taxpayers and investigates the importance of the SALT limitation to this differential. We calculate the effect of permanent implementation of the TCJA on households using The Fiscal Analyzer: a life-cycle, consumption-smoothing program incorporating ...