India's expansionary fiscal policy during the recent crisis resulted in higher government borrowing through 2008-09 and 2009-10. This borrowing requirement came in about 83% above the budget estimate in 2008-09, and 65% above the previous year in 2009-10. The debt-to-GDP ratio rose from 69%...

This paper provides evidence of bounded rationality by large dealers in U.S. Treasury auctions. I argue that these dealers use a heuristic of yield-space bidding which leads to biases manifested in three ways: they submit dominated bids, i.e., those that could be improved without raising the...

Brazil has had a long period of high inflation. It peaked around 100 percent per year in 1964, decreased until the first oil shock (1973), but accelerated again afterward, reaching levels above 100 percent on average between 1980 and 1994. This last period coincided with severe balance of...

High and unsustainable public debt is an economic problem at the center of many emerging and developing economies. This paper investigates, for the period 1978-2017, how the Surinamese Government reacted to changes in public debt for the period 1978-2017 and assesses if fiscal policy was...

According to an influential theoretical argument, presidential systems tend to present smaller governments because the separation between those who decide the size of the fiscal purse and those who allocate it creates incentives for lower public expenditures. In practice, forms of government...

Under what conditions do countries comply with their fiscal policy rules? We tackle this question in the context of emerging countries, with a specific focus on Latin America and the Caribbean, a region where fiscal rules have become increasingly common in recent decades. Based on an original...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the efficiency of the 26 Swiss cantons over the period 2000 to 2004 applying Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). A Total Public Sector Performance (TPSP) indicator for eight local government activities (administration, public safety, education, culture and...

In this paper we investigate the effect of family connections to politicians on individuals' labor market outcomes. We combine data for Italy over almost three decades from longitudinal social security records on a random sample of around 1 million private sector employees with the universe of...

Over the past decade, prudent fiscal management has served Thailand well in cushioning the impact of the global financial turbulence. However, going forward, fiscal risks which include a weakened global economic outlook, unbalanced fiscal structure and growing contingent liabilities may have...

To reinforce the long-term sustainability of public finances, the South African National Treasury has proposed a set of fiscal guidelines informed by three principles, namely: a counter-cyclical fiscal stance, long-term debt sustainability and inter-generational equity. Owing to the sound...