The sovereign debt crisis in the euro area has raised interest in early warning indicators, aimed at signalling the build-up of fiscal stress in advance and helping prevent crises by means of a timely counteraction of fiscal and macroeconomic policies. This paper presents possible improvements...

This paper estimates the effects of exogenous fiscal policy shocks in Spain in a VAR framework. Government expenditure expansionary shocks are found to have a positive impact on output in the short term at the cost of higher inflation and public deficits and lower output in the medium and long...

This paper reviews the existing empirical evidence on the short term impact on prices of fiscal variables and assesses it against new results from harmonised simulations, conducted with six well established econometric models used by the ECB and five national central banks (NCBs) of the...

Two issues are addressed in this paper. First, we attempt to ascertain whether the current fiscal policy in Spain satisfies the intertemporal borrowing constraint. For this purpose, we apply the traditional empirical tests of sustainability proposed in the literature, that pay special attention...

Fiscal decentralisation has been one of the key features of developments in the Spanish public sector in recent decades. There has been a gradual shift of responsibilities for the management of certain services form the State to the regional governments along with development of the arrangements...

This paper provides a first approach to the analysis of the determinants of public balances of regional (Autonomous) governments. These determinants have been divided into economic, political and institutional factors and into those factors specific to lower levels of government (fiscal...

This paper estimates the response of per capita GDP growth to changes in the proportion of mature workers across countries. We define and estimate the effect of demographic maturity in two ways. First, a growing cohort of working age persons (15-64) is found to have a large positive effect on...

This paper offers empirical evidence for the Spanish case on the hypothesis that public ownership may be a determinant of a firm's performance. Two alternative definitions of efficiency are proposed: relative productivity and profitability. The role of ownership is tested, conditioning for the...

What are the output responses to fiscal policy? Despite important advances reported in the literature, quantifying the size of the fiscal multiplier remains a challenge. Indeed, the quest to estimate a unique fiscal multiplier is probably an ill-posed one. The magnitude of the multiplier may...

This paper builds a large overlapping generations model of a small open economy featuring imperfect competition in the labor and product markets to understand i) which were the main determinants of the large expansionary phase experienced in Spain from the mid-1990s until the arrival of the...