Public debt has been rising markedly over the years, which suggests an increase in public expenditure financed by debt instead of taxation. There is no consensus on the economic implications of borrowing to finance public expenditure. We assess empirically the macroeconomic effects of public...

We investigate the effect of a local territorial reform, which reduced the number of parishes, on municipality spending efficiency in the period 2011-2016. We build a composite output indicator and use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to compute efficiency scores, which we then analyze through a...

The prevalence of either Ricardian or non-Ricardian fiscal regimes is important both for practical policy reasons and to assess fiscal sustainability, and this is of particular relevance for European Union countries. The purpose of this paper is to assess, with a panel data set, the empirical...

In order to assess the existence of expansionary fiscal consolidations in Europe, panel data models for private consumption are estimated for the EU15 countries, using annual data over the period 1970–2005. Three alternative approaches to determine fiscal episodes are used, and the level of...

The main focus of this paper is the relation between the cyclical components of total revenues and expenditures and the budget balance in France, Germany, Portugal, and Spain. We try to uncover past trends behind the development of public finances that contribute to explaining the current stance...

We assess the sustainability of public finances in the EU15 over the period 1970-2006 using stationarity and cointegration analysis. Specifically, we use panel unit root tests of the first and second generation allowing in some cases for structural breaks. We also apply modern panel...

In this paper we test whether a reallocation of government budget items can enhance long-term GDP growth in a set of European countries. We apply modern panel data techniques to the period 1970-2006, and we use three alternative dependent variables in a growth regression: economic growth, total...

This paper analyses the effects in terms of size and volatility of government revenue and spending on growth in OECD and EU countries. The results of the paper suggest that both variables are detrimental to growth. In particular, looking more closely at the effect of each component of government...

Using annual data from 14 European Union countries, plus Canada, Japan and the United States, we evaluate the macroeconomic effects of public and private investment through VAR analysis. From impulse response functions, we are able to assess the extent of crowding-in or crowding-out of both...

We decompose fiscal policy in three components: i) responsiveness, ii) persistence and iii) discretion. Using a sample of 132 countries, our results point out that fiscal policy tends to be more persistent than to respond to output conditions. We also found that while the effect of cross-country...