The smoothing impact of fiscal stabilizers (proxied by government expenditures) on business cycle volatility is studied for a panel of European Union (EU) countries in the period 1970-1999. Special emphasis is put on the investigation of possible nonlinearities in the relationship between Gross...

Using a theoretical model based on dynamic optimizing agents, we test empirically the Ricardian equivalence proposition (REP) for the EU-15 countries. The theoretical setting allows us to obtain estimates of the structural parameters of the model and to test directly the hypothesis implied by...