[From the introduction]. Institutional and ideological influences are not as important as they might seem at first glance. Seen from Bologna, there are good reasons to doubt the mainstream critique of European macroeconomic governance. Probably the most important is the bias in the conventional...

This paper discusses some of the recent developments in growth theory, doing so from the perspective of a small open economy. After setting out a basic generic model, we show how it may yield two of the key models that have played a prominent role in the recent literature, the endogenous growth...

The idea of a flat tax, a tax levied at a single rate, has become an increasingly discussed and implemented fiscal strategy across Europe and the rest of the world. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania adopted flat tax systems in 1994 and 1995, making them the first modern countries to adopt flat...

Developing country fiscal policy outcomes documented in data point to stark differences compared with developed ones. Most prominent difference is the excessive volatility of government consumption and transfer payments and their positive correlation relative to output. This seemingly...

The twenty-two papers collected in this volume illustrate the itinerary of Henry Tulkens, an applied theorist, on the occasion of his retirement from teaching. The collection is structured in four parts: I. Decentralized resource allocation processes for public and private goods - II....

Japanese monetary and fiscal policy uses the consumer price index as a metric for price stability. Despite a major effort to improve the index, the Japanese methodology of calculating the CPI seems to have a large number of deficiencies. Little attention is paid in Japan to substitution biases...

This dissertation is a collection of essays with the main objective of estimate and understand macroeconomic behavior of emerging countries by the lenses of modern tools in general equilibrium modeling. In the first chapter, I study whether structural parameters of Small Open Economy Real...

It is widely argued that Europe's unified monetary policy calls for international coordination at the fiscal level. We survey the issues involved with such coordination of fiscal policy as a demand management tool and we use a simple model to investigate the circumstances under which...

This paper argues that when EU member states joined EMU, this resulted in domestic institutional changes in the areas of fiscal policy-making and wage-setting. The paper argues that these changes were triggered by two facts: (i) in EMU, the monetary policy can no longer be used as an instrument...