This paper provides empirical evidence showing that smaller countries tend to have more volatile government spending for a sample of 160 countries from 1960 to 2000. We argue that the larger size of a country decreases the volatility of government spending because it acts as an insurance against...

This paper revisits the evidence on the monetary policy transmission channels. It extends the existing literature along three lines: it takes a global perspective with aggregate series based on a broader set of countries (ca 70% per cent of the global economy) and a longer time (1960-2010) than...

We decompose fiscal policy in three components: i) responsiveness, ii) persistence and iii) discretion. Using a sample of 132 countries, our results point out that fiscal policy tends to be more persistent than to respond to output conditions. We also found that while the effect of cross-country...