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 studies the effects of delegating control of sovereign debt issuance to an independent authority in a monetary union where public spending decisions are decentralized. The model assumes that no policy makers are capable of commitment to a rule. However, consistent with Rogoff (1985)...

Motivated by the failure of fiscal rules to eliminate deficit bias in the euro area, this paper analyzes an alternative policy regime in which each Member State government delegates at least one fiscal instrument to an independent authority with a mandate to avoid excessive debt. Other fiscal...

This paper investigates the welfare and economic stabilization properties of a fiscal transfers scheme between members of a monetary union subject to sovereign spread shocks. The scheme, which consists of cross-country transfer rules triggered when sovereign spreads widen, is incorporated in a...

We study simple fiscal rules for stabilizing the government debt level in response to asymmetric demand shocks in a country that belongs to a currency union. We compare debt stabilization through tax rate adjustments with debt stabilization through expenditure changes. While rapid and flexible...

There is evidence in the literature of fiscal consolidation episodes producing (non-Keynesian) expansionary effects (e.g. Alesina and Ardagna, 1998). We replicate this result for a panel of OECD countries under exogeneity of the fiscal tightening decision, and provide evidence that this decision...

Accounting for the pervasive evidence of limited international risk sharing is an important hurdle for open-economy models, especially when these are adopted in the analysis of policy trade-offs likely to be affected by imperfections in financial markets. Key to the literature is the evidence,...

The vast macroeconomic literature trying to explain the widely observed equity home bias disregards internationally active firms. In a DSGE model that features the endogenous choice of firms to become internationally active through either exports or foreign direct investment (FDI), we find that...

This paper describes a paradox of global thrift. Consider a world in which interest rates are low and monetary policy is constrained by the zero lower bound. Now imagine that governments implement prudential financial and fiscal policies to stabilize the economy. We show that these policies,...

High unemployment and fiscal austerity during the Great Recession have led to significant migration outfl ows in those European countries that suffered a deep deterioration of their economy, Greece being the most obvious case. This paper introduces endogenous migration in a small open economy...