We measure the amount of smoothing achieved through various components of the government deficit in EU and OECD countries. For EU countries, at the 1-year frequency percent of shocks to GDP are smoothed via government consumption, 18 percent via transfers percent via subsidies, while taxes...

In this paper we show how two seemingly irrelevant accounting principles for central banks -the choice of the unit of account for its balance sheet and the method of inventory valuation of foreign currency reserves- can overstate or understate profits transferred to the treasury and how this can...