In April this year the European Parliament in Strasbourg said "no" to the multi-annual budget which Governments of the European Union member Countries had agreed upon in February 2013. The changes may be minimal, but a strong message was sent to governments by the only institution in Europe...

This paper studies the optimal level of discretion in policymaking. We consider a fiscal policy model where the government has time-inconsistent preferences with a present-bias towards public spending. The government chooses a fiscal rule to trade off its desire to commit to not overspend...

Neoliberalism has not given rise to a sustained profit-led growth process, but to a finance-dominated accumulation regime in which growth relies either on financial bubbles and rising household debt (‘debt-driven growth’) or on net exports (‘export-driven growth’). The financial crisis...

The way forward for Italy, within a Europe that has to change. A Europe that is too economics-minded and not politically-minded enough, where growth and employment are stifled by tight budgets. Yet another path is possible, if we still keep the single currency but if we change regulations and...

We study the volatility of growth rates and find that it differs systematically across countries. Our empirical investigation reveals that there is a high correlation between disparity in political regimes across countries and differences in volatility. This is not the case for some of the...

Over 1.8 billion people — from Central Europe to East Asia — have been involved in the great systemic transformation to market economy, civic society and democracy, lasting already a generation. The process has evolved more by chance than by design, and has brought mixed fruits. The...

There appears to be a strong upward drift in policy-related economic uncertainty after 1960. We consider two classes of explanations for this rise. The first stresses growth in government spending, taxes, and regulation. A second stresses increased political polarization and its implications for...

This article is the first to renews the old debate of "rules versus. discretion" by introducing propensity score matching methods in macro analysis, such as Tapsoba (2012), and by using instrumental methods, to consider the national stability culture. By taking into account, at the same time,...

Due to the interdependence of the contemporary world economy, the great American crisis of 2008-2010 rapidly has become the global crisis. However, it is not just another, only larger than before crisis. It is a fundamental crisis of the capitalist market economy based on neoliberalism....

The Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States was released on January 27th, 2011. The strong political differences within the commission prevented the draft of a shared report. In addition to the majority report, two...