We analyse the long-run imbalances of finance-dominated capitalism underlying the present crisis – which began in 2007 – with a focus on developments in the US and Germany. We argue that beyond inefficient regulation of the financial sector, the severeness of the present crisis has been...

This paper analyses the link between discretionary fiscal policy and output growth in ten CEE countries. Three aspects are considered: cyclical pattern in the fiscal discretion, contributions to GDP growth, and the link between policy aggressiveness and output volatility. Fiscal discretion is...

Economic growth data does not show how such growth was achieved. Was it based on income growth and consumption spending levels or was it based on borrowings to extend the income levels? The question is vital for deciding which economic tools work best for correcting imbalances. The main...

I examine the effects of fiscal policy actions on private consumption in a yearly panel of sixteen OECD countries conditional on the phase of the business cycle and the state of the public finances. I demonstrate that binding liquidity constraints on households can alter the efficacy of the...

This paper takes into account the dynamic feedback between government expenditures and output in a model that separates the effects of expected and unexpected government expenditures on output. We allow for standard determinants based on Solow’s growth model, as well as financial globalization...

Keynes’ original intention in introducing the concept of a liquidity trap was to explain the reason why persistent large amounts of unutilized resources were generated during the Great Depression. This paper shows that this type of phenomenon cannot be explained in the framework of a...

The objective of this paper is to investigate the optimality of EMU fiscal rules from a welfare perspective. We compute welfare-maximizing feedback coefficients for monetary and fiscal rules in a NK-DSGE with a high number of nominal and real distortions, calibrated on the Euro-area data. The...

The paper links money supply to the state budget deficit in the Italian historical context. The process of monetization of government deficit is analysed and is related both to the fixity of the exchange rate and free capital mobility typical of the 1860-1913 period. The empirical evidence...

An analysis of the multiplier for the US federal government's consumption expenditures is presented. A simple approach to identify the influence of the federal government's consumption expenditures on economic activity using reduced-form equations is clearly presented and examined using annual...

This paper constructs a narrative account of all legislated discretionary policy changes in the United Kingdom from 1945 to 2009. Following Romer and Romer (2009, 2010), evidence of the policymakers’ motivation is presented from U.K. official Budget documents together with technical notes,...