Drawing on a database for 1988-2006 containing information on 157 countries, we investigate the effects on military spending of government form and democracy, electoral rules and concentration of parliamentary parties. From an OLS regression on pooled data, our results show that presidential democracies spend more than parliamentary systems on defense, whereas its interaction with a majoritarian electoral rule reduces the defense burden. Our findings suggest that, in contrast to theoretical predictions in the literature, institutions do not have the same impact on the provision of all public goods.

This paper investigates the consequences of the legalization of around 600,000 immigrants by the unexpectedly elected Spanish government of Zapatero following the terrorist attacks of March 2004 (Garcia-Montalvo, 2011). Using detailed data from payroll-tax revenues, we estimate that each newly legalized immigrant increased local payroll-tax revenues by 4,189 euros on average. This estimate is only 55 percent of what we would have expected from the size of the influx of newly documented immigrants, which suggests that newly legalized immigrants probably earned lower wages than other workers and maybe affected the labor-market outcomes of those other workers. We estimate that the policy change deteriorated the labor-market outcomes of some low-skilled natives and immigrants and improved the outcomes of high-skilled natives and immigrants. This led some low-skilled immigrants to move away from high-immigrant locations. Correcting for internal migration and selection, we obtain that each newly legalized immigrant increased payroll-tax revenues by 4,801 euros, or 15 percent more than the estimates from local raw payroll-tax revenue data. This shows the importance of looking both at public revenue data and the labor market to understand the consequences of amnesty programs fully.

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En este artículo estimamos los efectos fiscales del destape de las cotizaciones a la seguridad social en España. Este ejercicio no es trivial porque no hay datos públicos disponibles sobre salarios por encima del nivel máximo de cotización. Sin embargo, en 2019 una reforma aumentó el tope cerca de un 7% y reveló parcialmente la forma de la distribución para los trabajadores con salarios altos. Explotamos esta variación y mostramos que el destape podría aumentar los ingresos de la seguridad social en un 0,22% del PIB. A continuación, discutimos las implicaciones de esta estimación para la reforma de las pensiones. Combinado con un aumento en las tasas de contribución de 0,6 puntos porcentuales (Mecanismo de equidad intergeneracional) y una regularización de los inmigrantes indocumentados, los ingresos totales recaudados podrían pagar el 44 % del aumento esperado en el gasto de pensiones para 2030.