A sustainable long-run pattern in the relative competitiveness of euro area countries is a key factor for the survivorship of the monetary union. We analyze the issue focussing on unit labor cost dynamics using cointegration analysis for the whole economy and for the manufacturing sector...

The large imbalances within euro area have led to renew interest in tax policies that could reduce labour costs and thus improve competitiveness and growth. In this paper, we consider whether it would be more growth-enhancing for euro area countries to, instead, use capital income tax cuts. To...

We analyze fiscal rules within a Monetary Union in the presence of (i) asymmetric information about member states' potential output and, therefore, output gap and (ii) bail-out among member states. In our framework, bail-out lowers the scope for signalling (discrimination) by member states...

A number of novelties have emerged in the study of the discretionary fiscal policy within the Euro area during the last decade. Among the others, the availability of up-to-date information on fiscal indicators for the years following the Great Recession, the introduction of cutting-edge...

This paper attempts to evaluate the effects of fiscal policy announcements by the Italian government on the long-term sovereign bond spread of Italy relative to Germany. After collecting data on relevant fiscal policy announcements, we perform an econometric comparative analysis between the...

The ongoing massive fiscal policy stimulus triggered increasing concerns on the potential impact on interest rate levels, as economic theory predicts. Particularly, the deterioration of some EMU countries' fiscal positions has been putting at risk Eurozone' financial stability. In this paper, we...

We analyze fiscal rules within a Monetary Union in the presence of (i) asymmetric information on member states' potential output and (ii) bail-out among member states. The first-best deficit is contingent on the cycle, that is, on member states' output gap. In the presence of asymmetric...

This paper applies the DSGE-VAR methodology to assess the size of fiscal multipliers in the data and the relative contributions of two transmission mechanisms of government spending shocks, namely hand-to-mouth consumers and Edgeworth complementarity. Econometric experiments show that a DSGE...

This article addresses the existence of a wide range of estimated government spending multipliers in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of the euro area. Our estimation results and counterfactual exercises provide evidence that omitting the interactions of key ingredients at the...