This paper examines under what conditions fiscal policy in the form of government spending should contribute to macroeconomic stabilisation.  To this end optimal fiscal targeting rules minimising the microfounded social loss are examined in the following settings.  Firstly, for the benchmark...

This paper surveys the empirical research on fiscal policy analysis based on real-time data. This literature can be broadly divided in three groups that focus on: (1) the statistical properties of Revisions in fiscal data; (2) the political and institutional determinants of projection errors by...

The objective of this study is to use both static and dynamic frameworks to compare the benefits that immigrants draw from the public system with their contributions through the taxes that they pay. The main conclusion of this article is that the impact of immigration on welfare systems is weak....

Recent attempts to incorporate optimal fiscal policy into New Keynesian models subject to nominal inertia, have tended to assume that policy makers are benevolent and have access to a commitment technology.  A separate literature, on the New Political Economy, has focused on real economies...

We consider optimal monetary and fiscal policies in a New Keynesian model of a small open economy with sticky prices and wages.  In this benchmark setting monetary policy is all we need - analytical results demonstrate that variations in government spending should play no role in the...

This paper provides empirical evidence showing that smaller countries tend to have more volatile government consumption for a sample of 160 countries from 1960 to 2000. The analysis also shows that country size is negatively related to the discretionary part of government consumption and to the...

In this paper we argue that any assessment on the intentional stance of fiscal policy should be based upon all the information available to policymakers at the time of fiscal planning. In particular, real-time data on the discretionary fiscal policy “instrument”, the structural primary...

This paper uses a stratified sample of firms across OECD economies over the period 1996-2004 to analyse the effects of corporate taxes on productivity and investment. Applying a differences-in-differences estimation strategy which exploits differential effects of corporate taxes on firms with...

This paper deals with fiscal policy coordination. In particular, it focuses on the question of how fiscal policy can be coordinated inside EMU, where countries still differ considerably in terms of cyclical behaviour and importance of country-specific shocks and well as the fiscal policy...

This paper tries to assess fiscal policy rules in the OECD countries. In particular, we examine whether the EU/EMU countries have had the same rule in terms of the cyclical situation. The analysis is based on a simple VAR model for output growth, inflation and a fiscal indicator. Empirical...