Voter attitudes towards the welfare state, its specific programs, or specific people who are supposed to “benefit” from the implied social transfers have always been of vital interest for discussions in the public and political spheres. In this working paper, Peter Grand and Guido Tiemann (EconPol Europe, IHS Vienna) examine public sentiments concerning the conditionality of unemployment benefits and find that opinion is influenced by the supposed level of 'deservedness', along with economic, social, and institutional context.

While tax administrations have made considerable progress in fighting tax evasion, it remains a seemingly inextricable part of our world. Exploiting unique datasets covering over 28,000 tax evaders in the Netherlands, Wouter Leenders, Arjan Lejour, Simon Rabaté and Maarten van’t Riet investigate the distribution of tax evasion and its implications for the measurement of wealth inequality. They show that the distributional pattern of tax evasion depends on the type of tax evasion, e.g. it depends on the offshore country of choice. They explore a number of explanations to account for the differences in results and caution against projecting distributional patterns of detected tax evasion onto still undetected evasion. 
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This working paper, from António Afonso, João Tovar Jalles and Ana Venâncio, evaluates the effects of structural tax reforms on government spending efficiency in a sample of OECD economies over the period 2007-2016. Increases in tax rates result in falling public efficiency, with the negative effect found to be more significant for increases in personal income tax and value added tax. In times of economic expansion, increasing the corporate income tax base and reducing personal income tax rates were found to have a positive impact on public sector efficiency. In recessions, efficiency improves when the personal income tax and value added tax bases increase and the corporate income tax rate increases. 

António Afonso, João Tovar Jalles, Ana Venâncio have conducted a review of the literature dealing with overall public sector performance and efficiency, defining a methodology to assess public sector efficiency and create a novel and large cross-sectional panel dataset of government indicators and public sector efficiency scores. The focus is on a balanced sample covering all 36 OECD countries over the time period between 2006 and 2017. The authors have defined a set of economic and sociodemographic metrics necessary to construct performance composite indicators and calculated and reported a full set of (input and output oriented) efficiency scores based on the performance indicators previously computed.

Is green consumerism beneficial to the environment and the economy? To shed light on this question, Stefan Ambec and Philippe De Donder study the political economy of environmental regulations in a model with neutral and green consumers where the latter derive some warm glow from buying a good of higher environmental quality produced by a profit-maximizing monopoly, while the good bought by neutral consumers is provided by a competitive fringe.

In this working paper from Bruno Biais (HEC Paris), Christophe Bisière, Matthieu Bouvard, Catherine Casamatta and Albert J. Menkveld (EconPol Europe, Toulouse School of Economics, Universite Toulouse Capitole [TSM-Research]), the authors offer an equilibrium model of cryptocurrency pricing and confront it to new data on bitcoin transactional benefits and costs. The model emphasises that the fundamental value of the cryptocurrency is the stream of net transactional benefits it will provide, which depend on its future prices. The link between future and present prices implies that returns can exhibit large volatility, unrelated to fundamentals. They construct an index measuring the ease with which bitcoins can be used to purchase goods and services and measure costs incurred by bitcoin owners. Consistent with the model, estimated transactional net benefits explain a statistically signicant fraction of bitcoin returns.

Using realized investment data, this working paper from Carlos San Juan Mesonada and Carlos Sunyer Manteiga (EconPol Europe, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) empirically assesses the effects of the European Structural and Investment Funds on the regional convergence of income in Spanish regions, comparing the results in terms of real regional convergence. The level of indebtedness in the region has a definite adverse effect on the effectiveness of European projects, and the authors also identify an apparent spillover effect from the funds towards other border regions.

What government should do, how it should spend and how far it should intervene in the economy are the issues investigated by António Afonso (EconPol Europe, Universidade de Lisboa; REM/UECE), Ludger Schuknecht (OECD) and Vito Tanzi (International Institute of Public Finance) in this working paper. Taking a historical perspective, they assess the composition of public expenditure for advanced, emerging and developing countries and conclude that, while developing countries can struggle with providing well-functioning services, governments are increasingly demonstrating that progress is feasible.

Between 2013 and 2015, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the Portuguese government revoked four holidays for public and private employees - but the revocation seems to have served little economic purpose and been no more than a ceremonial gesture. In this paper, authors António Afonso (EconPol Europe, Universidade de Lisboa; REM/UECE), Maria João Guedes (Universidade de Lisboa; Advance/CSG), Pankaj C. Patel (Villanova University, Villanova School of Business) show that revocation of the holidays did not impact labor productivity for either central or local and regional government managed state owned enterprises.

An expanding body of research finds a sharp increase in the average markups in the US and Europe, driven by firms located at the top of the markup distribution; other studies find that markups in the US and Europe have increased only moderately or even remained stable. These differing results have triggered a discussion on methodology, a key issue being the choice of the free input in the production function approach. Authors Gerrit Hugo van Heuvelen, Leon Bettendor and Gerdien Meijerink (EconPol Europe, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis) show that the choice of the free input is crucial, and may explain at least some of the discrepancies in the findings in the recent literature. They illustrate this with the case of the Netherlands, which has a large share of flexible work arrangements and temporary labor contracts as well as fixed contracts.