Government forecasts of GDP growth and budget balances are generally more over-optimistic than private sector forecasts. When official forecasts are especially optimistic relative to private forecasts ex ante, they are more likely also to be over-optimistic relative to realizations ex post. For...

A popular view among economists, policymakers, and the media, is that the Maastricht Treaty and then Stability and Growth Pact have significantly impaired the ability of EU governments to conduct a stabilizing fiscal policy and to provide an adequate level of public infrastructure. In this...

This paper begins by discussing the inherent conflict between the simultaneous existence of a single currency for the countries of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the independent fiscal policies of those countries. The Stability and Growth Pact was an attempt to reconcile that...

Most empirical analyses of monetary policy have been confined to frameworks in which the Federal Reserve is implicitly assumed to exploit only a limited amount of information, despite the fact that the Fed actively monitors literally thousands of economic time series. This article explores the...

We present a framework for computing and evaluating linear projections of macro variables conditional on hypothetical paths of monetary policy. A modest policy intervention is a change in policy that does not significantly shift agents' beliefs about policy regime and does not generate...

We evaluate the effects of three ECB policies (the Securities Markets Programme, the Outright Monetary Transactions, and the Long-Term Refinancing Operations) on government bond yields. We use a novel Kalman-filter augmented event-study approach and yields on euro-denominated sovereign bonds,...

The possibility that the euro area might break up was being raised even before the single currency existed. These scenarios were then lent new life five or six years on, when appreciation of the euro and problems of slow growth in various member states led politicians to blame the European...

We show that a fiscal expansion by the core economies of the euro area would have a large and positive impact on periphery GDP assuming that policy rates remain low for a prolonged period. Under our preferred model specification, an expansion of core government spending equal to one percent of...

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 cross-country spillovers of tax...