A Progressive Consumption Tax: An Important Instrument for Stabilizing Business Cycles, or Just an Exotic Idea?

ABSTRACT We introduce progressive consumption taxation into a real-business-cycle setup augmented with a detailed government sector. We calibrate the model to Bulgarian data for the period following the introduction of the currency board arrangement (1999–2016). We investigate the quantitative importance of the presence of progressive taxation of consumption expenditures for the stabilization of cyclical fluctuations in Bulgaria. We find the quantitative effect of such a tax to be very small, and thus not important for either business cycle stabilization or public finance issues.