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...

This paper analyses the effects in terms of size and volatility of government revenue and spending on growth in OECD and EU countries. The results of the paper suggest that both variables are detrimental to growth. In particular, looking more closely at the effect of each component of government...

We compute average mark-ups as a measure of market power throughout time and study their interaction with fiscal policy and macroeconomic variables in a VAR framework. From impulse-response functions the results, with annual data for a set of 14 OECD countries covering the period 1970-2007, show...

In this paper we assess to what extent in the existence of a financial crisis, government spending can contribute to mitigate economic downturns in the short run and whether such impact differs in crisis and non crisis times. We use panel analysis for a set of OECD and non-OECD countries for the...

In order to assess the existence of expansionary fiscal consolidations in Europe, panel data models for private consumption are estimated for the EU15 countries, using annual data over the period 19702005. Three alternative approaches to determine fiscal episodes are used, and the level of...

In this paper we first explore the impact of nominal and real persistence on the transmission process of various shocks in an estimated DSGE model of euro area. We then analyse its impact on optimal monetary policy and investigate the performance of various monetary policies when the policy...

The paper aims at deriving some stylised facts for financial, real, and monetary policy developments during asset price booms by means of aggregating information contained in 38 boom periods since the 1970s for 18 OECD countries. We observe 26 macroeconomic variables in a pre-boom, boom and...

In monetary policy strategies geared towards maintaining price stability conditional and unconditional forecasts of inflation and output play an important role. This paper illustrates how modern sticky-price dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, estimated using Bayesian techniques, can...

This paper estimates a DSGE model with many types of shocks and frictions for both the US and the euro area economy over a common sample period (1974-2002). The structural estimation methodology allows us to investigate whether differences in business cycle behaviour are due to differences in...