Suchergebnisse

Defence date: 7 February 1998 ; Examining Board: Prof. Fabio Canova, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, co-supervisor ; Prof. Tryphon Kollintzas, University of Athens ; Prof. Alfonso Novales, Universidad Complutense de Madrid ; Prof. Mark Salmon, EUI and City University London, Supervisor ; First made available online on 4 September 2018 ; Stochastic dynamic general equilibrium models have become in recent years the central paradigm for the analysis and understanding of macroeconomic fluctuations. As Gali (1995) puts it, though early applications to business cycle models (e.g., Kydland and Prescott (1982)) were generally restricted to model economies for which technology shocks were the only sources of fluctuations, and where built-in classical assumptions guaranteed the optimality of equilibrium allocations, the flexibility of that paradigm has been illustrated in a number of recent papers which have developed models of economies characterized by the presence of non-classical features (e.g., imperfect competition as in Rotemberg and Woodford (1991), Gali (1994) or Ubide (1995) and/or alternative sources of fluctuations (e.g., shocks to government spending as in Christiano and Eichenbaum (1992) or Baxter and King (1993)). These efforts to enrich the basic framework have been conducted with the objective of improving its empirical relevance and performance.

Many considerations are involved in examining the regularities regarding how changes in the tax burden affect national budget revenues, on the one hand, and how these changes influence economic activities, on the other hand. This book will explain how these affect employment and output rates. It is equally important to examine how government spending influences economic growth. The Keynesian model of aggregate demand gives a quite comprehensive picture of how the tax burden influences economic growth. Though this model has been the subject of many studies and is well explored, it can be said t