The effectiveness of cyclically adjusted balances (CABs) as an indicator of the health of public finances depends on the accuracy with which cyclically adjusted figures can be calculated in real time. This paper measures the accuracy of such figures using a specially constructed real time...

During the Great Crisis, most governments in industrial countries supported their domestic financial sector under stress and responded to strong declines in output growth with fiscal stimulus packages. Starting in 2010, attention focused on the sustainability of the resulting debt burdens. We...

This paper evaluates the cyclicality, inertia and effect of EU accession on fiscal policy in Central and Eastern Europe using a real time dataset. Budget balances are found to react in a stabilising way to economic activity, and they are less inert than is typically found in Western Europe....

This paper estimates a monetary policy reaction function for the ECB over the period 1999-2009. To allow for a potential shift in interest rate setting during the financial crisis, we permit a smooth transition from one set of parameters to another. The estimates show a swift change in the...

This paper analyses how the financial crisis has affected task of meeting the Maastricht Criteria for the eight Central and Eastern European Countries which have yet to join the euro. It identifies the channels by which the crisis has fed through to deficits, debt, interest rates and inflation...

This paper analyses the problem faced by CEECs wishing to join the Euro who must hit both an inflation and exchange rate criterion during a period of nominal convergence. This process requires either an inflation differential, an appreciating nominal exchange rate, or a combination of the two,...

Following the Maastricht criteria, a country seeking to join the European Monetary Union cannot have an inflation rate in excess of 1.5 percent plus the average inflation rates in the three 'best performing' EU countries. This inflation reference value is a non-increasing function of the number...

We use futures instead of forward rates to study the complete maturity spectrum of the forward premium puzzle from two days to six months. At short maturities the slope coefficient is positive, but these turn negative as the maturity increases to the monthly level. Futures data allow us to...

We estimate the excess impact of financial asset capital losses relative to gains on household active savings and durable goods consumption in the Netherlands. The sample period covers both the stock market boom during the 90's, and the bear period afterwards. The results suggest that households...

We investigate the effects of official fiscal data and creative accounting signals on interest rate spreads between bond yields in the European Union. Our model predicts that risk premia contained in government bond spreads should increase in both, the official fiscal position and the expected...