A sustainable long-run pattern in the relative competitiveness of euro area countries is a key factor for the survivorship of the monetary union. We analyze the issue focussing on unit labor cost dynamics using cointegration analysis for the whole economy and for the manufacturing sector...

We show that policy uncertainty about how the rising public debt will be stabilized accounts for the lack of deflation in the US economy at the zero lower bound. We first estimate a Markov-switching VAR to highlight that a zero-lower-bound regime captures most of the comovements during the Great...

What are the macroeconomic effects of tax adjustments in response to large public debt shocks in highly integrated economies? The answer from standard closed-economy models is deceptive, because they underestimate the elasticity of capital tax revenues and ignore crosscountry spillovers of tax...

We assess the time varying features of fiscal sustainability in the euro area via revisiting the empirical relationship between the primary budget surplus and the debt-to-GDP ratio. Focusing on a sample of 11 Euro-area countries between 1999Q1 and 2013Q4 and by means of time series analyses, we...

We study the effects of the euro area monetary policy on the institutional sectors in Portugal during the period 2000:4 2015:4. Our results show that the single monetary policy affected some variables that are proxies for the funding of each institutional sector of the economy: general...

This paper provides new insights about the existence of expansionary fiscal consolidations in the Economic and Monetary Union, using annual panel data for 14 European Union countries over the period 1970-2012. Different measures for assessing fiscal consolidations based on the changes in the...

We study a panel of 17 economies in the first wave of globalization, between 1870 and 1914, regarding the fiscal consequences of deflation. By means of impulse response analyses and panel regressions, we find that a 1 percent fall in the price level leads to an increase in the debt ratio of...

We study the role of firm heterogeneity in affecting business cycle dynamics and optimal stabilization policy. Firms differ in their degree of cyclicality, and hence, exposure to aggregate risk, leading to firm-specific risk premia that influence resource allocations. The heterogeneous firm...

Since the 2001 recession, average core inflation has been below the Federal Reserve's 2% target. This deflationary bias is a predictable consequence of a low nominal interest rates environment. When monetary policy faces the risk of encountering the zero lower bound, in.ation tends to remain...

A number of novelties have emerged in the study of the discretionary fiscal policy within the Euro area during the last decade. Among the others, the availability of up-to-date information on fiscal indicators for the years following the Great Recession, the introduction of cutting-edge...