This discussion paper led to a publication in <A href="http://www.springerlink.com/content/n3w45lxj307m883m/">'Public Choice'</A> 109(3-4) 371-94.<P>In this paper we investigate experimentally the functioning of a wage tax financed unemployment benefit system on the development of the budget deficit, unemployment, and some other indicators of economic performance...</p></a>

This paper assesses the transmission of fiscal policy shocks in a New Keynesian framework where government expenditures contribute to aggregate production. It is shown that even if the impact of government expenditures on production is small, this assumption helps to reconcile the models'...

This paper examines the pricing of public debt in a quantitative macroeconomic model with government default risk. Default may occur due to a fiscal policy that does not preclude a Ponzi game. When a build-up of public debt makes this outcome inevitable, households stop lending such that the...

This discussion paper led to a publication in <A href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292111000912">'European Economic Review'</A>, 56(2) 216-32.<P>This paper is concerned with a policy oriented macroeconomic experiment involving an 'international' economy with a relatively small 'home' country and a large 'foreign' country. It compares the economic...</p></a>

We study optimal government spending in a business cycle model with frictional unemployment. The Ramsey optimal policy is contrasted with a reference policy which would be first best in a frictionless economy. Results are: the Ramsey policy i) implies a higher steady state ratio of government...

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of government spending shocks and the fiscal transmission mechanism in the euro area for the period 1980-2008. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we investigate changes in the macroeconomic impact of government spending shocks using time-varying...