Public investment in advanced economies is at historical lows, and shows a declining trend since at least the 1980s. Two main hypotheses have been posed to rationalize this fact. On the one hand, the “social dominance hypothesis” claims that this is related to structural factors, given the...

The issue of the size of fiscal spillovers in the euro area has gained prominence recently, given proposals to coordinate fiscal policies that aim at achieving an appropriate “aggregate fiscal stance”, consistent with economic and monetary policy conditions. Given the heterogeneous fiscal...

we analyse the impact of fiscal policy shocks in the euro area as a whole, using a newly available quarterly dataset of fiscal variables for the period 1981-2007. to allow for comparability with previous results on euro area countries and the us, we use a standard structural var framework, and...

The analysis of the macroeconomic impact of fiscal policies in the euro area has been traditionally limited by the absence of quarterly fiscal data. To overcome this problem, we provide two new databases in this paper. Firstly, we construct a quarterly database of euro area fiscal variables for...