Labour Supply and Incentives to Work in Europe highlights recent developments in the labour supply in Europe and gives a detailed assessment of their link with economic policies and labour market institutions. Despite major changes in European labour supply during the past few decades, the...

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 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.

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 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 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...

In the framework of a new money market econometric model, we assess the degree of precision achieved by the European Central Bank ECB) in meeting its operational target for the short-term interest rate and the impact of the U.S. sub-prime credit crisis on the euro money market during the second...

The paper analyses the impact of import penetration on firms’ profitability in 15 manufacturing industries in 10 euro area countries during 1995-2004, focusing on the role of emerging market economies. Our results indicate that import competition from emerging market economies has had an...

This paper presents a quarterly estimated structural macroeconomic model for the euro area, denoted area-wide model (AWM). This model has been developed with four uses in mind: the assessment of economic conditions in the area, macroeconomic forecasting, policy analysis and deepening...

There has been much discussion of the differences in macroeconomic performance and prospects between the US, Japan and the euro area. Using Markov-switching techniques, in this paper we identify and compare specifically their major business-cycle features and examine the case for a common...