Fiscal balances have deteriorated quickly in recent years, bringing back to the foreground the question what factors help explain such sharp changes. This paper takes a broad perspective at the issue regarding countries included, the range of explanatory variables tried, and the time-span. The...

This paper highlights the importance of debt-related fiscal rules and derives growth-maximising public debt ratios from a simple theoretical model. On the basis of evidence on the productivity of public capital, we estimate public debt targets that governments should try to maintain if they wish...

Against the background of the euro area sovereign debt crisis, our paper investigates the relationship between public debt and economic growth and adds to the existing literature in the following ways. First, we extend the threshold panel methodology by Hansen (1999) to a dynamic setting in...

This paper investigates the average impact of government debt on per-capita GDP growth in twelve euro area countries over a period of about 40 years starting in 1970. It finds a non-linear impact of debt on growth with a turning point—beyond which the government debt-to-GDP ratio has a...

The behaviour of the exchange rate under a floating exchange rate regime for a small open economy with perfect capital mobility may appear like a managed float or even a firmer peg. We present a canonical new neo-classical synthesis open economy model where the central bank follows a strategy...

The notable increase in international reserve holdings over the past decade and their use during the global financial crisis of 2008/2009 has sparked renewed interest in the analysis of the optimal level of reserve holdings, in particular in countries which are subject to sudden stops. Less...

We assess the cointegration relationship between current account and budget balances, and effective real exchange rates, using recent bootstrap panel cointegration techniques and SUR methods. We investigate the magnitude of the relationship between the two imbalances for each country for the...

In this paper, we analyze the relation between interest rate targets and money supply in a (bubble-free) rational expectations equilibrium of a standard cash-in-advance model. We examine contingent monetary injections aimed to implement interest rate sequences that satisfy interest rate target...