François Langot

Fiscal Devaluation and Structural Gaps

The paper characterizes the optimal tax scheme in an open economy with structural inefficiencies on the labor market and on government size. On analytical grounds first, we show that the economy can use fiscal revaluation to exploit the terms of trade externality and to dampen the impact of an excessive public spending. However, if real labor market rigidities are large enough, fiscal devaluation may be desirable. Second, we provide a quantitative assessment of the optimal tax reform using France as the benchmark economy. Our results show that France would benefit more from fiscal devaluation than a economy where the labor market is more flexible, as the US. We also show that the welfare gains from the optimal tax reform crucially depend on the ability of the government to target its optimal size.

Accounting for Labor Gaps

In this paper we develop a balanced growth model with labor supply and search and matching frictions in the labor market, to study the impact of economic policy variables on the two margins which constitute the (total) labor input: the extensive margin (the rate of employment) and the intensive margin (the hours worked per worker). We show that the dynamics of taxes primarily have an impact on hours worked, while labor market institutions have a significant influence on the rate of employment. However, our findings emphasize that there is an interaction between the two margins. The model is tested on four countries (US, France, Germany and the UK), which have experienced different tax and labor market dynamics since the sixties. Using this structural approach, we can then perform counterfactual experiments about the evolution of the policy variables, and compare the implications of policy changes in terms of production as well as average welfare.