The cyclicality of fiscal policy in Ireland in the budgetary plans put before parliament and ex-post is considered. Data in budgetary documents and particular econometric estimation procedures help address endogeneity issues and provide numerous variable-estimation procedure combinations for...

An understanding of the house price to rent ratio and its determinants is important in assessing housing market developments and tenure choice therein. While the ratio is most usually explained by the user cost of capital, the influence of credit conditions on it has been added to econometric...

This paper considers whether Ireland's sovereign bonds have decoupled from other euro area sovereigns (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain - the "periphery") with whom it was categorised during the sovereign bond market crisis of the early 2010s. Having initially reviewed yield and sovereign...

A reason for revising the EU fiscal rules in the early 2010s was to improve member states' forecasts against a background of documented biases in official projections. Using data from Stability and Convergence Programmes and the European Commission's Spring Forecasts, evidence is presented which...

Blanchard and Leigh (2013, 2014) find fiscal multipliers to be underestimated in the EU in the deep recession of the early 2010s. Using two 2013-2018 datasets for 26 EU member states, assembled from Stability and Convergence Programmes and the European Commission's Spring Forecasts, we show that...

Data from member states' Stability and Convergence Programmes from 2011 to 2018 are used to assess the cyclicality of government consumption in the EU after the European Semester took effect. Econometric estimations, which address endogeneity issues, find the intended (ex-ante) fiscal policy to...

The performance of the Irish economy over the period 2002-2019 varied considerably, with a credit-led boom up to 2007 being followed by a sharp fall in economic activity and house prices in the following five years. This provides a valuable sample for investigating the relevance of the housing...

The credit-driven housing net worth channel has been identified as a determinant of the sharp drop in US employment between 2007 and 2009. We examine the impact of this channel on the labour market in Europe using panel data for 20 countries covering the period 1996 to 2017. This period saw...

In the growing literature on the importance of household balance sheets to macroeconomic developments, the relationship between housing wealth and fiscal outturns needs consideration given the likely links between housing market developments and particular tax headings. We adopt the housing net...

Against a backdrop of debt ratio targets being central to recent proposed changes to the EU fiscal rules, we examine errors in official forecasts of the General Government debt ratios and their determinants in 26 member states from 2012 to 2019 when the "six pack" rules applied. We find debt...