This paper assesses how monetary authorities behave and how they interact. Pooled data for the 15 members of the European Union except Luxembourg and five other OECD countries serves to answer these questions. Three basic conclusions emerge. First, fiscal policy responds to the ratio of public...

Several recent studies imply that the response of national saving to fiscal policy is non-monotonic. In this paper, we use two data sets to search for the circumstances in which such non-monotonic responses arise: one refers to a sample of OECD countries, as in previous studies, and one to a...

This paper analyses the determinants of public expenditures allocated to investment. We perform welfare analysis in an overlapping generations model with public consumption, public investment, debt and taxes. The optimal public investment share depends positively on the productive contribution...

Do plans for a monetary union in Europe call for limits on the freedom of the member countries to use fiscal policy? To provide a tentative answer, we simulate the IMF model MULTIMOD, given various shocks, in the case of a European Monetary Union consisting only of France and Germany. The...

What purpose does the European Monetary System serve? Who benefits from it? Is it a Deutschmark zone? Or could one argue that, despite the asymmetrical positions of France and Germany, the System does serve a certain collective interest? An attempt to answer these questions reveals a basic...