Do public sector wages exert pressures on private sector wages, or has the private sector a leadership role in wage setting? This paper tries to isolate the pure signalling effect that one sector might exert on the other by controlling for other determinants of wages (prices, productivity,...

We use a newly available dataset of euro area quarterly national accounts fiscal data and construct multivariate, state-space mixed-frequencies models for the government deficit, revenue and expenditure in order to assess its information content and its potential use for fiscal forecasting and...

This paper looks at public and private sector wages interactions since the 1960s in the euro area, euro area countries and a number of other OECD countries. The paper reports, first, a strong positive annual contemporaneous correlation of public and private sector wages over the business cycle;...

Public deficit figures are subject to revisions, as most macroeconomic aggregates are. Nevertheless, in the case of Europe, the latter could be particularly worrisome given the role of fiscal data in the functioning of EU's multilateral surveillance rules. Adherence to such rules is judged upon...

This study examines the business cycle behaviour of public consumption and its main components; the public wage bill (including compensation per employee and public employment) and intermediate consumption in the euro area aggregate, euro area countries and a group of selected non-euro area OECD...

In this paper I evaluate the usefulness of a set of fiscal indicators as early-warning-signal tools for annual General Government Net Lending developments for some EMU countries (Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Ireland, Austria, Finland) and an EMU aggregate. The...

Short-term fiscal indicators based on public accounts data are often used by European policy makers. They represent one of the main sources of publicly available intra-annual fiscal information. Nevertheless, these indicators have received limited attention from the academic literature analysing...

The analysis of the macroeconomic impact of fiscal policies in the euro area has been traditionally limited by the absence of quarterly fiscal data. To overcome this problem, we provide two new databases in this paper. Firstly, we construct a quarterly database of euro area fiscal variables for...