The paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature that has investigated the conditions under which a contractionary fiscal policy is effective in reducing debt and deficit, but does not have a negative effect on growth. The issue is central to macroeconomics and policy making, given...

This paper provides empirical evidence showing that smaller countries tend to have more volatile government spending for a sample of 160 countries from 1960 to 2000. We argue that the larger size of a country decreases the volatility of government spending because it acts as an insurance against...

This paper seeks to contribute to debate on the issue of reform of pension systems in the EU, in the context of the direct effects of such provisions on fiscal policy.

We assess the fiscal behaviour in the European Union countries for the period 1990-2005 via the responsiveness of budget balances to several determinants. The resultsshow that the existence of effective fiscal rules, the degree of public spendingdecentralization, and the electoral cycle can...

This study addresses the issue of relations between the balances of individual sectors, applying standard statistical measures. A number of general observations were make. First, it is apparent that imbalances of the public, private and external sectors in most EU countries have tended to...

This paper reviews the literature on the finance-growth nexus within a neoclassical growth framework, placing an emphasis on the policy implications in the current European environment, that has placed financial reforms high on the policy Agenda. While more research is needed to establish...

The main objective of this paper is to study whether the introduction of the euro hadan impact on the degree of integration of European Government bond markets. Weadopt the CAPM-based model of Bekaert and Harvey (1995) to compare, from thebeginning of Monetary Union until June 2008, the...

This paper contributes to the literature on the properties of money and creditindicators for detecting asset price misalignments. After a review of the evidence inthe literature on this issue, the paper discusses the approaches that can be consideredto detect asset price busts. Considering a...

This paper estimates the wealth effects on consumption in the euro area as a whole. Ishow that: (i) financial wealth effects are relatively large and statistically significant;(ii) housing wealth effects are virtually nil and not significant; (iii) consumptiongrowth exhibits strong persistence...

We consider a simple extension of the basic new-Keynesian setup in which we relaxthe assumption of frictionless financial markets. In our economy, asymmetricinformation and default risk lead banks to optimally charge a lending rate above therisk-free rate. Our contribution is threefold. First,...