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...

This article derives time-varying threshold multipliers for G7 countries and the euro area, above which consolidation will be self-defeating (that is, leading to an increase rather than a decrease in the debt-to-GDP ratio). Simulations suggest that these thresholds have declined since the...

A volatile pattern of government spending and its financing triggers uncertainty about the timing and the costs of assets sale in financial markets, thereby leading to higher interest rates. This, in turn, hampers the extension of credit to businesses and individuals. The empirical results...

Front-loaded fiscal austerity since the 2008 financial crisis has meant that the UK economic experience is being viewed as a kind of test case for the proposition that contractionary fiscal policy can induce an economic expansion. The discussion has often been implicitly framed in terms of the...

We analyze the effects of foreign nurse immigration on the occupational choice of natives and the quality of native entrants into the nursing sector. Using an empirical strategy that exploits large geographical differences in the distribution of foreign nurses across US states, we find that, in...

In this article we assess the impact of public support for R&D activities on the educational mix of R&D employees in private companies. Data on tax incentives in support of R&D activities of companies in Belgium are matched with R&D survey data to investigate changes in the share of R&D...

This study investigates the influence of controlling-minority ownership structures (CMSes) on the employment adjustment of firms. We propose that entrepreneur-operated CMS firms typically develop a stewardship governance structure, which relies heavily on the social and psychological context of...

I review theoretical arguments suggesting that certain labour market institutions can be justified for economic efficiency reasons. In models with intrinsic market failures, rigiditiesʺ like employment protection legislation and institutional wage compression may push the economy closer to the...

In this paper we analyse labour productivity growth in 51 industries in European countries and the United States. Using shift-share techinques we identify the industries in which the U.S. is leading most strongly. With a detailed decomposition analysis we identify whether the sources of the U.S....