The sovereign debt crisis in the euro area has raised interest in early warning indicators, aimed at signalling the build-up of fiscal stress in advance and helping prevent crises by means of a timely counteraction of fiscal and macroeconomic policies. This paper presents possible improvements...

In this paper we reflect on the role that fiscal policy could play in the resolution of the crisis in Eurozone countries crippled by both public and private debt, and beset by growth and competitiveness problems. As an illustration, we revisit the Spanish case, a paradigmatic example of the...

Should rational agents take into consideration government policy announcements? A skilled agent (an econometrician) could set up a model to combine the following two pieces of information in order to anticipate the future course of fiscal policy in real-time: (i) the ex-ante path of policy as...

This paper reviews the existing empirical evidence on the short term impact on prices of fiscal variables and assesses it against new results from harmonised simulations, conducted with six well established econometric models used by the ECB and five national central banks (NCBs) of the...

This article investigates the effects of macroeconomic policy (monetary and fiscal) on output growth during financial crises characterized by a “sudden stop” in net capital inflows in developing and emerging market economies. We investigate 83 sudden stop crises in 77 countries over...

Recent research in both the social and natural sciences has been devoted to increasing our ability to predict disasters, prepare for them and mitigate their costs. Curiously, we appear to know very little about the fiscal consequences of disasters. The likely fiscal impact of a natural disaster...

This paper aims to test the validity of the Ricardian proposition for the Spanish economy from three different approaches: a) by testing its theoretical implications on the stability of national saving and the relationship between fiscal and current account balances, b) by carrying a number of...

What are the output responses to fiscal policy? Despite important advances reported in the literature, quantifying the size of the fiscal multiplier remains a challenge. Indeed, the quest to estimate a unique fiscal multiplier is probably an ill-posed one. The magnitude of the multiplier may...

This paper develops a medium-scale dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium (DSGE) model for fiscal policy simulations. Relative to existing models of this type, our model incorporates two important features. First, we consider a two-country monetary union structure, which makes it well suited...

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was intended to stimulate the U.S.economy and to create jobs. But at what cost? In this paper, we discuss the range of potential benefits and costs associated with counter-cyclical fiscal policy. Benefits and costs may be social, macroeconomic,...