The paper uses fiscal reaction functions for a panel of euro-area countries to investigate whether euro membership has reduced the responsiveness of countries to shocks in the level of inherited debt compared to the period prior to succession to the euro. While we find some evidence for such a...

We investigate the political determinants of risk premiums which sub-national governments in Switzerland have to pay for their sovereign bond emissions. For this purpose we analyse financial market data from 288 tradable cantonal bonds in the period from 1981 to 2007. Our main focus is on two...

In this paper we suggest that Eurozone countries face a policy trade-off among: 1) a common rule imposing co-movements in fiscal policy; 2) financial stability; and 3) financial integration. We provide empirical evidence documenting the existence of such a trade-off in the period characterized...

Fiscal federalism may not be a panacea in a monetary union if it does not address the non-cooperative behaviour between fiscal policymakers. To prove this, we assess the relative merits of a fiscal federalism scheme in a monetary union and intergovernmental fiscal cooperation without such a...

We assess the role of national fiscal policies, as automatic stabilizers, within a monetary union. We use a two-country New Keynesian DGE model which incorporates non-Ricardian consumers (as in Gali et al. 2004) and a home bias in the composition of national consumption bundles. We find that...

In a monetary union, the interaction between several governments and a single central bank is plagued by several sources of deficit bias, including common pool problems. Each government has strong preferences over local spending and taxation but suffers only part of the costs of union-wide...

Labor mobility is commonly taken as a property of an optimal currency area. But how does that property affect the outcome of fiscal policies? In our model, we show that perfect (costless) labour mobility is not necessarily welfare improving, since it prevents the national fiscal authorities from...

We briefly review the theoretical and empirical consequences of discretionary fiscal policy changes, after which we provide our own estimates for the EU countries. A fiscal expansion raises output and consumption and reduces the trade balance. Moreover, the stimulating effect of higher...

We study the desirability of limits on the public debt and of political turnover in an economy where incumbents have an incentive to set public expenditures above the socially optimal level due to rent-seeking motives. Parties alternate in office and cannot commit to future policies, but they...