A relevant mismatch between tax and expenditure decentralization characterizes many industrialized countries. The former is usually less pronounced than the latter, resulting in asymmetric fiscal decentralization arrangements. We investigate the nature of this asymmetry using a theoretical...

We study the relationship between discretionary fiscal policy and macroeconomic stability in 21 OECD countries over the 1985-2012 period. The novelties of our contribution lie in the use of annual panel data, whereas most of the existing evidence is cross-sectional, and more importantly in the...

The budgeting process has been recently reformed in Italy (L. 196/2009) in order to improve control of budget and transparency in the provision of clear information on government fiscal policy. Indeed, the general government final expenditures often deviate significantly from the initial...

Policymakers in modern and open economies face a macroeconomic trilemma (Obstfeld, Shambaugh, and Taylor 2005). There are three main sought-after objectives: 1. to stabilize the exchange rate; 2. to enjoy free international capital mobility 3. to engage in a monetary policy oriented toward...

Many claim that fluctuations in US private savings help to create and to sustain global imbalances because of their influence on the current account deficit. To test this claim, this paper investigates the determinants of aggregate household savings using a panel of 18 developed countries for...

We investigate the effects of fiscal policy on private consumption and investment in the European Union. A certain consensus has aroused that fiscal impulses have expansionary Keynesian effects on the economic activity. However, the existing empirical literature has concentrated on few...

This article investigates how wealth and capital gains affected household consumption in the USA in the period 1989-2004. The empirical evidence brought so far by a large literature that investigates the role of wealth shocks on consumption is mixed, due to the low quality of the data more...

This article investigates how wealth affected household consumption in the USA in the period 1989-2007. Previous empirical results are mixed, mostly because of the low quality of the data more readily available. We combine information from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and the Survey of...

How does household wealth influence consumption? The empirical evidence brought so far by the literature is unclear, mostly because of the low quality of the data more readily available: aggregate data, cross sections and panel datasets lacking important variables all present major shortcomings...

Average hourly productivity has often been used to draw conclusions on long run per capita GDP growth, based on the assumption of full utilization of labour resources. In this paper, we argue that a failure to recognize the potentially significant wedges among the two variables – even in the...