News Archive

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.

Sacrificing lives does not save the economy, according to this latest policy report from Panu Poutvaara and Madhinee Valeyatheepillay: countries that fail to suppress the pandemic risk a disastrous overburdening of their health care system and patients who could have been otherwise saved die. Short of an effective vaccine, no single measure is enough to stop the pandemic. Instead, societies need a combination of effective social distancing measures, careful hygiene, use of masks in indoor public spaces and contact tracing.

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.

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.

In this policy report, Hernán D. Seoane (EconPol Europe, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) analyzes one aspect of the sovereign-bank nexus: the feedback effects between banks and sovereigns derived from the holdings of sovereign debt in domestic banks. He examines how this relationship evolved during the European debt crisis and how it responded to the implementation of ECB monetary policy based on Open Market Operations and Marginal Lending Facilities.