The "Great Lockdown" implemented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a severe world-wide economic crisis. In euro area countries, sovereign debt-to-GDP ratios are on the rise and reductions in expected fiscal surpluses raise sustainability concerns amongst investors. This paper...

In 2012, 22 EU countries signed the Fiscal Compact, an intergovernmental agreement aimed at backing EU fiscal rules with national arrangements. The main objective of the Compact was to strengthen compliance. Based on a survey of national independent fiscal institutions, we take a closer look at...

EMU driven interest rate convergence has led to a significant reduction of borrowing costs for some European governments in the second half of the nineties. The paper deals with the possible consequences for deficit behaviour. Although the impact of interest rates on deficits is a crucial...

The costs of wars have been the main driver of public debt in the Western World during the modern era. The late twentieth century stands out as a period that saw a pronounced increase of government debt to GDP ratios in peacetime. This paper assesses the role that financial crises have played in...

Die Konsolidierung der Staatsfinanzen nach der gegenwärtigen Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise wird eines der zentralen wirtschaftspolitischen Themen der nächsten Jahre sein: Die Regelungen zur "Schuldenbremse" sehen für den Bundeshaushalt bis 2016 einen annähernd ausgeglichenen Haushalt vor, und...

This paper analyses the international dimension of fiscal policy using a small open economy framework in which the government finances its spending by levying distortionary taxation and issuing non-state-contingent debt. The main finding of the paper is that, once the open economy aspect of the...

The present paper explores the extent to which new joint General Budget Support (GBS) systems have been able to overcome the problems of aid dependency and negative fiscal incentives that can potentially result from high levels of on-budget aid. As approximately 90 percent of new joint GBS goes...

Low-skilled immigrants indirectly affect public finances through their effect on native wages & labor supply. We operationalize this indirect fiscal effect in various models of immigration and the labor market. We derive closed-form expressions for this effect in terms of estimable statistics....

Having sufficient fiscal capacity to tax is a key hallmark and defining feature of states, and there is a growing literature trying to explain its origins. Existing empirical evidence on fiscal capacity is scarce and focuses on large, ex-post successful territories. In this paper we study the...