Una estimación del coste marginal en bienestar del sistema impositivo en España

Actual tax systems do not follow the normative recommendations of yhe theory of optimal taxation. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the informational difficulties of knowing or estimating all relevant elasticities and parameters. Secondly, the political complexities that would arise if a new tax implementation would depart too much from current systems that are perceived as somewhat egalitarians. Hence an ex-novo overhaul of the tax system might just be non-viable. In contrast, a small marginal tax reform could be politically more palatable to accept and economically more simple to implement. The goal of this paper is to evaluate, as a step previous to any tax reform, the marginal welfare cost of the current tax system in Spain. We do this by using a computational general equilibrium model calibrated to a point-in-time micro database. The simulations results show that the Spanish tax system gives rise to a considerable marginal excess burden. Its order of magnitude is of about 0.50 money units for each additional money unit collected through taxes.

The structural approach of a natrex model on equilibrium exchange rates

Following a general macroeconomic approach, this paper sets a closed micro-founded structural model to determine the long run real exchange rate of a developed economy. In particular, the analysis follows the structure of a Natrex model. The main contribution of this research paper is the development of a solid theoretical framework that analyse in depth the basis of the real exchange rate and the details of the equilibrium dynamics after any shock influencing the steady state. In our case, the intertemporal factors derived from the stock-flow relationship will be particularly determinant. The main results of the paper can be summarised as follows. In first place, a complete well-integrated structural model for long-run real exchange rate determination is developed from first principles. Moreover, within the concrete dynamics of the model, it is found that some convergence restrictions will be necessary. On one hand, for the medium run convergence the sensitivity of the trade balance to changes in real exchange rate should be higher that the correspondent one to the investment decisions. On the other hand, and regarding long-run convergence, it is also necessary both that there exists a negative relationship between investment and capital stock accumulation and that the global saving of the economy depends positively on net foreign debt accumulation. In addition, there are also interesting conclusions about the effects that certain shocks over the exogenous variables of the model have on real exchange rates.

The effect of candidate quality on electoral equilibrium: an experimental study

When two candidates of different quality compete in a one dimensional policy space, the equilibrium outcomes are asymmetric and do not correspond to the median. There are three main effects. First, the better candidate adopts more centrist policies than the worse candidate. Second, the equilibrium is statistical, in the sense that it predicts a probability distribution of outcomes rather than a single degenerate outcome. Third, the equilibrium varies systematically with the level of uncertainty about the location of the median voter. We test these three predictions using laboratory experiments, and find strong support for all three. We also observe some biases and show that they canbe explained by quantal response equilibrium.