This paper discusses the development of public expenditure in the Netherlands since 1850. Why did public expenditure increase from 14% GDP in 1850, nearly 20% in 1921, 30% GDP in 1950 and over 60% GDP in 1983? Dutch public expenditure has fallen to less than 50% GDP in 2003. Why did this...

This paper provides novel evidence on the time varying impact of government spending shocks on output in Germany over the years 1970 to 2013. In a first step, I use an expectations-augmented vector autoregressive model with time varying parameters (TVP-VAR) to show that fiscal multipliers are...

The traditional approach towards analyzing the impact of public investment has been through including public capital as a third input factor in a Solow-model production function. Nonetheless, such approach implies several problems both at the theoretical and empirical level. Given such problems,...

In the aftermath of a crisis which has now been lasting for more than five years, the debate about the size of fiscal multipliers arouse. Whatever the estimation approach, fiscal multipliers assumed for projections are the result of extrapolations from time series data. The present contribution...

This paper explores different fiscal stimuli within a business cycle model with an endogenous mass of firms which we estimate for the U.S. economy using Bayesian techniques. We demonstrate that a changing mass of firms is a crucial dimension for evaluating fiscal policy since it can both...

Aiyagari (1995) showed that long-run optimal fiscal policy features a positive tax rate on capital income in Bewley-type economies with heterogeneous agents and incomplete markets. However, determining the magnitude of the optimal capital income tax rate was considered to be prohibitively...

In this paper, we consider how European institutions contributed to the euro crisis. In principle, the Stability and Growth Pact was intended to minimize externalities by preventing macro-economic "bad behavior" in the form of large budget deficits. In practice, it has had a difficult history,...

Creation of optimal tax and budget systems is one of the Difficult problems of economic science. One of the most important areas of tax reform is to develop a tax code in the aspect of optimal tax gravity. The new tax code - a step to improvement, since a number of reduced taxes and simplified...

The aim of this study is to develop a new framework (V-L-D) for detecting the short term vulnerabilities in fiscal policy for the European Union countries. The methodology relies ontwo distinct indicators: one showing the vulnerabilities signalled by the size of the cyclically adjusted budget...

This study examines the short-run effects and dynamics of exogenous shocks to the regular budgets of the local authorities in Israel with emphasis on the reduction in government participation and taking into account the heterogeneity of the local authorities. To accomplish this, the study uses a...