In this paper we analyse debt stabilization in a monetary union that features endogenous risk premia. In particular, we analyse debt stabilization in two diametrically opposed regimes. In the first regime, the "national fiscal discipline regime", financial markets impose sovereign risk premia...

For a sample of sixteen OECD countries over the period 1980-2007 we show that, for given debt-GDP ratio, an increase in the maturity of the public debt by one year lowers its long-term interest rate by around 20-30 basis points. This effect is stronger for countries with higher average inflation...

Over the next four decades, increasing old-age dependency ratios exert an enormous upward pressure on welfare spending in most developed countries. As this is mainly due to existing unfunded public pension schemes, many countries have embarked on far-reaching reforms in this area, strengthening...

This paper reviews the practice and performance of revenue forecasting in selected OECD countries. While the mean forecast errors are small in most countries, the precision of the forecasts measured by the standard deviation of the forecast error differs substantially across countries. Based on...

Predicting available tax revenue accurately is a key step of fiscal policy. It has recently been shown that revenue projection errors have a direct impact on fiscal deficits. In this paper, we explore the relationship between the ideology of the finance minister and tax revenue projection...

In this paper, we disentangle tax revenue forecast errors into influences stemming from wrong macroeconomic assumptions and false predictions of the elasticities linking the tax base to its corresponding tax type. Across six tax types and the overall tax sum for Germany, we find a heterogeneous...

This paper documents the existence of Political Forecast Cycles. In a theoretical model of political selection, we show that governments release overly optimistic GDP growth forecasts ahead of elections to increase the reelection probability. The bias arises from lack of commitment if voters are...

Immigration policy can have important net fiscal effects that vary by immigrants' skill level. But mainstream methods to estimate these effects are problematic. Methods based on cash-flow accounting offer precision at the cost of bias; methods based on general equilibrium modeling address bias...

We examine forecast accuracy and efficiency of the Social Security Administration's projections for cost rate, trust fund balance, trust fund ratio made during 1980-2020 with horizons up to 95 years. We find that the reported deterioration in the accuracy of the forecasts during 2010’s has...

The budget dispute between Italy and the European Commission in 2018 gave new impetus for the debate about the reliability of output gap estimation methods and their use for calculating structural budget balances. In this paper we review the main properties of the mainstream approaches and...