The Role of Government Has Changed Overnight

The coronavirus crisis has caused fiscal interventions of unprecedented scale and nature. Some have speculated that, even after the health emergency has largely dissipated, the role of government will be substantially altered. Joel Slemrod will examine this contention by relating it to the classic public finance issue of externalities, which arise in many dimensions—Pigouvian, Keynesian, fiscal, cross-border, and epidemiological, and speculate about the implications for future tax systems, including the level and nature of taxation as well as the enforcement of tax compliance.

In cooperation with the Mannheim Applied Seminar, a seminar series by ZEW and the University of Mannheim.