Owing to slow growth and a relatively weak fiscal position, Portugal’s public debt had been rising for almost a decade when the global crisis struck, sharply increasing the deficit. The loss of confidence in Portuguese and other euro area sovereign bonds required international financial...

Ireland’s banking crisis, one of the most severe in the OECD area, and the associated economic recession have taken a heavy toll on public finances. Large public deficits have accumulated since 2008 and net public debt, which had been eliminated, has soared once again. The rapid deterioration...

This paper examines the effect of economic crises on structural unemployment using an Autoregressive Distributed Lags model and accounting for the role of institutional settings. Analysing an unbalanced panel of 30 OECD economies from 1970 to 2008, we found that downturns have, on average, a...

In this working paper, 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 responding to output variations. We also found that while the...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the relation between the volatility of government consumption and country size. Using a sample of 160 countries from 1960 to 2000 the main findings of our empirical analysis suggest that: 1) smaller countries have more volatile non-discretionary and...

This paper examines the effects of fiscal policy on output in the euro area. For this purpose we develop a DSGE Fiscal Model with endogenous government bond yields to assess the impact of different fiscal policy shocks on output, its components and on government debt. The simulations suggest...