This paper explores the determinants of deviations of ex-post budget outcomes from first-release outcomes published towards the end of the year of budget implementation. The predictive content of the first-release outcomes is important, because these figures are an input for the next budget and...

The Benini distribution is a lognormal-like distribution generalizing the Pareto distribution. Like the Pareto and the lognormal distributions it was originally proposed for modeling economic size distributions, notably the size distribution of personal income. This paper explores a...

Many structural econometric models include latent variables on whose probability distributions one may wish to place minimal restrictions. Leading examples in panel data models are individual-specific variables sometimes treated as "fixed effects" and, in dynamic models, initial conditions. This...

This Policy Brief introduces the Gini Trade Index (GTI) as a new trade synthetic key performance indicator capable of capturing the different distribution of trade values across firm characteristics and across countries. The new indicator replicates the well-known features of the traditional...

This paper analyses long-term fiscal sustainability with a model which incorporates a number of feedback effects. When fiscal policy responds to ensure long-term sustainability, these feedback effects can potentially modify the intended outcomes by either enhancing or dampening the results of...

To the best of our knowledge, our paper is the first systematic study of the predictive power of monetary aggregates for future inflation for the cross section of New EU Member States. This paper provides stylized facts on monetary versus non-monetary (economic and fiscal) determinants of...

New Zealand's fiscal outlook deteriorated following the Global Financial Crisis, and in late 2008 fiscal projections showed net government debt in New Zealand increasing from 5% of GDP to around 40% within 10 years, mostly reflecting permanently lower expectations for future tax revenue. These...

In this paper we analyze how the availability of credit influences the relationship between government size as a proxy for fiscal stabilization policy and the amplitude of business cycle fluctuations in a sample of advanced OECD countries. Interpreting relatively low loan-tovalue ratios as an...

The paper explores the interaction between the proposed monetary union for ECOWAS and structural reforms of fiscal policy. The effects depend to a large extent on the degree of similarity of member countries. In a monetary union of similar countries, member states run a more distortive fiscal...