News - anticipated changes of an economy's fundamentals - drive the business cycle. Climate change is big news: it will impact the economy profoundly, but its full effect will take time to materialize. To better understand the transmission of news, this paper focuses on climate-change...

We use a new approach to assess long-term fiscal developments. By analyzing the time varying behaviour of the two components of government spending and revenue responsiveness and persistence - we are able to infer about the sources of fiscal behaviour. Drawing on quarterly data we estimate...

We assess the fiscal behaviour in the European Union countries for the period 1990-2005 via the responsiveness of budget balances to several determinants. The results show that the existence of effective fiscal rules, the degree of public spending decentralization, and the electoral cycle can...