Internal Research Seminars

How does tax progressivity alter the macroeconomic impact of carbon revenue recycling? This talk examines the interplay between labor tax progressivity and carbon revenue recycling through an Environmental Two-Agent New Keynesian (TANK) DSGE model. By evaluating lump-sum transfers, capital tax cuts, and broad versus targeted labor tax cuts across low- and high-income households, our study reveals trade-offs between economic output and distributional equity. The results show that targeted low-income labor tax cuts effectively reconcile growth with equity, while demonstrating how baseline tax progressivity serves dual functions as a powerful incentive multiplier and an automatic dynamic stabilizer against carbon-shock downturns. 

We ask whether ownership affects provider performance when patients cannot choose providers and providers cannot choose patients. In Slovakia’s emergency medical services, a centralized dispatch system sends the nearest available ambulance of the required type irrespective of its operator, making ownership quasi-random within narrowly defined locations. Across 2.7 million dispatches between 2020 and 2025, patients attended by public ambulances are approximately 4.5% more likely to die before reaching a hospital than comparable patients attended by private providers – roughly 280 additional deaths per year – while non-profit providers are statistically indistinguishable from private firms. The estimate is stable across spatial resolutions from 250 metres to the municipality, robust to restricting the sample to areas where both provider types operate, to excluding calls the dispatcher had classified as arrest or apnea before assignment, and to firm-level heterogeneity within ownership groups. The gap is concentrated in urgent and critical cases, among physician-staffed crews, and outside cities. Private units also arrive faster, and the effect is largest in the years preceding the national tender through which base locations are reallocated, consistent with a response to competitive incentives and suggesting that ownership effects depend on the contractual environment in which providers operate.