Article available under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) eprints@whiterose.ac.uk https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Reuse Unless indicated otherwise, fulltext items are protected by copyright with all rights reserved. The copyright exception in section 29 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 allows the making of a single copy solely for the purpose of non-commercial research or private study within the limits of fair dealing. The publisher or other rights-holder may allow further reproduction and re-use of this version -refer to the White Rose Research Online record for this item. Where records identify the publisher as the copyright holder, users can verify any specific terms of use on the publisher's website. TakedownIf you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing eprints@whiterose.ac.uk including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. Fiscal Consolidation with Tax Evasion and CorruptionEvi Pappa a,1, * , Rana Sajedi a,2 , Eugenia Vella a,3 a European University Institute, Florence, Italy, 50133 AbstractCross-country evidence highlights the importance of tax evasion and corruption in determining the size of fiscal multipliers. We introduce these two features in a New Keynesian model and revisit the effects of fiscal consolidations. VAR evidence for Italy suggests that spending cuts reduce tax evasion, while tax hikes increase it. In the model, spending cuts induce a reallocation of production towards the formal sector, thus reducing tax evasion.Tax hikes increase the incentives to produce in the less productive shadow sector, implying higher output and unemployment losses. Corruption further amplifies these losses by requiring larger hikes in taxes to reduce debt. We use the model to assess the recent fiscal consolidation plans in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Our results corroborate the evidence of increasing levels of tax evasion during these consolidations and point to significant output and welfare losses, which could be reduced substantially by combating tax evasion and corruption.

We estimate the effects of public wage expenditures on output and the labor market in U.S. data by identifying shocks to public employment and public wages using sign restrictions. Public wage shocks do not induce significant effects on output, but disaggregating by government level reveals that their effects can be contractionary at the federal level and expansionary at the state and local level. Public employment shocks are expansionary at all government levels by crowding in private consumption and increasing labor force participation and private-sector employment. Local government wage shocks lead to a similar crowd in of private consumption, while shocks to federal government wages lead to public-private wage spillovers, inducing a negative labor demand effect, a sharp fall in private-sector employment and an increase in unemployment. We develop a DSGE model with public good production, search and matching frictions, and endogenous labor force participation that matches the qualitative properties of the empirical evidence. The sign of the output response for public wage shocks depends crucially on the degree of complementarity between public and private goods in the consumption bundle.

We construct a model of a monetary union to study fiscal consolidation in the periphery of the euro area, through cuts in public-sector wages or hiring when the nominal interest rate is constrained at its lower bound. Consolidation induces a positive wealth effect that increases demand, as well as a reallocation of workers towards the private sector, which together boost private activity. However, in a low-inflation environment, demand is suppressed and the private sector is * We would like to thank the editor, L. Reichlin, and an anonymous referee for their comments, as well as A. Trigari for the insightful discussion. We are also grateful for comments to R. Wouters and other participants in the International Journal of Central Banking Research Conference 2017 and in the "Fiscal Policy after the Crisis" workshop organized by the European Commission. We would also like to thank A

This article assesses the productivity effects of infrastructure operation and maintenance (O&M) spending by state and local governments in the 48 contiguous U.S. states over the period 1978-2000. We explicitly account for transboundary spillovers of capital and O&M spending and follow a semiparametric methodology that allows us to estimate state-specific output elasticities. We find strong evidence that in all 48 states the cross-state spillover effects of O&M outlays on productivity exceed their within-state impacts and are substantially higher than the spillover effects of capital expenditure. (JEL C14, E22, E62, H76, O11, O47, R11)

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