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...

In this paper I use Ghosh et al. (2013) approach to assess Brazil's fiscal sustainability, fiscal fatigue, and public debt limit. Using monthly data for the last 21 years, I estimate Brazil's fiscal reaction function and an eventual fiscal fatigue effect, which is a lack of government's will (or...

The establishment of a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism (SDRM) is one of the important issues in the academic debate on a viable constitution for the European Monetary Union (EMU). Yet the topic seems to be taboo in official reform contributions to the debate. Against this backdrop, the...

In this paper, we analyze politicians’ expectations about future compliance with a fiscal rule, and in particular the dependence of the expectations on their role in parliament (opposition vs. incumbent government coalition). In addition, we explore how opposition and incumbent politicians...

We study the cyclicality of public R&D in 28 OECD countries (1995-2017). While procyclical on average, public R&D reacts asymmetrically over different phases of the business cycle and becomes acyclical during recessions. It is also heterogeneous across countries: Innovation leaders and followers...

I calculate unemployment multipliers of fiscal consolidation policies in a standard, closed-economy New Keynesian framework with search and matching frictions, and, as an innovation, in the presence of sectoral heterogeneity. Family and non-family firms behave differently in the labor market and...

This paper analyzes the sustainability of fiscal debt contingent on fiscal policy operating in two fiscal regimes. The first regime is characterized by active policy (not reacting to debt) and the other by passive fiscal policy (reacting to debt). The average duration for which either regime can...