Stability-oriented European institutions correspond to the general prescriptions of the ‘new macroeconomics consensus’. This contribution provides an assessment of the pros and cons of these institutions in terms of macro stabilisation and exchange-rate swings drawing on different scenarios....

This paper contributes to the debate on fiscal governance for the European Monetary Union, assessing the different fiscal rules currently discussed. We simulate a small scale macroeconomic model with forward looking agents, augmented with a public finances block. We account for both the positive...

The debate on public finances’ sustainability has long focused on the conditions for the accumulation of debt. This implied that, empirically, the analyses revolved around estimations of dynamic versions of the debt accumulation equation, through unit root tests and cointegration tests between...

The paper first reviews the evolution of federal fiscal rules in the United States, showing a trend towards balanced-budget rules, not golden rules. An explanation to this trend is provided in a model that includes voter's preferences that are skewed by the history of the budget structure, and...

This article studies the impact of oil shocks on the macroeconomy in two ways insofar unexploited in the literature. The analysis is conducted at the global level, and it explicitly accounts for the potentially changing nature of oil shocks. Based on an original world GDP series and a grouping...

We estimate a SVAR model of the French economy. The econometric method originates in Blanchard and Perotti [Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2002] but owes also extensively to the fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL) that investigates the interactions between government surplus, debt...

This paper addresses the issue of whether and by how much public investment or public capital can enhance economic performance. In comparison with the literature on the subject, we apply many different methodologies to answer these questions. A VAR model (for France, Italy, Germany, the UK and...

This paper uses the SVAR methodology to investigate the effects of public investment on growth, and more specifically, the effects of the introduction of a golden rule of public finance. We extend the existing literature by estimating a model of the British economy that takes into account long...

The literature on inflation targeting has up to now focused on its impact on macroeconomic performance or private expectations. In contrast, this paper proposes to investigate empirically whether the institutional adoption of this framework has changed the policy preferences of the central...

Since 1990, a growing number of countries have adopted inflation targeting (IT) around the world. Empirical evidence on its advantages has been mixed so far, and most assessments have been based on a control group methodology. In this paper, using a MSVAR technique, we assess the adoption of IT...