It is by now a widely shared insight that fiscal policy needs to be re-strengthened as a macroeconomic policy instrument within European macroeconomic policies: Recent experiences with austerity policies, new research regarding the size of the fiscal multiplier and the fact that monetary policy...

Potential output measures a country's attainable aggregate living standard and is thus one of the most important categories of economics. It is also a key indicator for monetary and fiscal policy. Despite its prominence, however, potential output is a difficult concept to pinpoint both...

Potential output measures a country's attainable aggregate living standard and is thus one of the most important categories of economics. It is also a key indicator for monetary and fiscal policy. Despite its prominence, however, potential output is a difficult concept to pinpoint both...

The trend of increasing inequality in the distribution of income and wealth in most developed countries has led to calls for corrective tax increases for the rich and wealthy. Such calls are often confronted with the claim that higher taxes on top personal incomes, corporate income and wealth...

We simulate the Euro Area's fiscal consolidation between 2011 and 2013 by employing two DSGE models used by the ECB and the European Commission, respectively. The cumulative multiplier amounts to 0.7 and 1.0 in the baseline, but increases to 1.3 with a reasonably calibrated financial accelerator...

This paper measures the net redistributive impact of the EU budget. It finds that for every € 1,000 difference in income per capita across countries, € 9 is offset by lower contributions to the budget and € 3 is offset by higher expenditures by the budget. The overall equalising effect is...

On the one hand, every official document about fiscal policy in Spain, and most orthodox academic papers argue that Spain has no "fiscal space" and that it should apply resolute actions to assure budget consolidation. On the other hand, Spain also had the second highest unemployment rate in the...

We analyze whether there are negative (positive) long-term effects of austerity measures (stimulus measures) on potential output growth. Based on the approach of Blanchard and Leigh (2013) and Fatás and Summers (2016) and using a novel dataset of narratively identified fiscal policy shocks, we...