This paper provides estimates for the base elasticities of Dutch taxes, paying particular attention to differences between short-and long-term elasticities, and allowing for asymmetric adjustment. Estimates are presented for five tax categories for the period 1970-2005, after making appropriate...

Currently the U.S. is experiencing record budget and current account deficits, a phenomenon familiar from the "Twin Deficits" discussion of the 1980s. In contrast, during the 1990s productivity growth has been identified as the primary cause of the US current account deficit. We suggest a...

This paper focuses on risk premiums paid by central governments in Europe and sub-national governments in Germany, Spain, and Canada. With regard to the European governments, we are interested in how these premiums were affected by the introduction of the euro. Using data for bond yield spreads...

This note looks at US$ and DM/Euro denominated government bond spreads relative to US and German benchmark bonds before and after the start of the current financial crisis. The study finds, first, that bond yield spreads before and during the crisis can largely be explained on the basis of...

This paper provides a study of bond yield differentials among EU eurobonds issued between 1991 and 2002. Interest differentials between bonds issued by EU countries and Germany or the USA contain risk premia which increase with the debt, deficit and debt-service ratio and depend positively on...

This report analyses the main developments in housing finance in the euro area in the decade, covering the period from 1999 to 2007. It looks at mortgage indebtedness, various characteristics of loans for house purchase, the funding of such loans and the spreads between the interest rates on...

This paper analyses the empirical relationship between fiscal policy and the current account of the balance of payments and considers how Ricardian equivalence changes this relationship. To do so, we estimate a dynamic panel threshold model for 22 industrialised countries in which the...

In this paper, we examine the macroeconomic effects of alternative fiscal consolidation policies in the New Area-Wide Model (NAWM), a two-country open-economy model of the euro area developed at the European Central Bank (cf. Coenen et al., 2007). We model fiscal consolidation as a permanent...

The sovereign debt crisis in the euro area has increased the interest in early warning indicators, with the aim to indicate the build?up of fiscal stress early on and to facilitate crisis prevention by a timely counteraction of fiscal and macroeconomic policies. This paper presents possible...

Using vector autoregressions on U.S. time series for 1957-1979 and 1983-2004, we find government spending shocks to have stronger effects on output, consumption, and wages in the earlier sample. We try to account for this observation within a DSGE model featuring price rigidities and limited...