The German debt brake is often regarded as a great success story, and has therefore served as a role model for the Euro area and its fiscal compact. In this paper we fundamentally criticize the debt brake. We show that (1) it suffers from serious shortcomings, and its success is far from certain...

Currently fiscal policies in Germany seem to be in a very comfortable position and the German Debt Brake is regarded as an institutional precondition for this success and has been exported to the Euro area in the guise of the Fiscal Compact. In this paper we scrutinize German fiscal policies and...

In response to the recent sovereign debt crisis, the member states of the European Union agreed to enact balanced budget rules in their national legislation. However, little is known about the public's opinion of balanced budget rules. To fill this gap, we conducted a survey among 2,000...

In this paper we discuss the relationship between the current account rebalancing in the Eu-rozone, income distribution and wage policies with a focus on the main surplus economy, Germany. We will illustrate how and to which extent German wage policies could be able to contribute to a more...

Brazil has had a long period of high inflation. It peaked around 100 percent per year in 1964, decreased until the first oil shock (1973), but accelerated again afterward, reaching levels above 100 percent on average between 1980 and 1994. This last period coincided with severe balance of...

Large and growing levels of public debt in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and the Euro Area raise new interest in the cross-country effects of a large open economy's deficits. The authors consider a dynamic optimising model with costly tax collection and exogenously given public...

The Broad Economic Policy Guidelines contain the answers of the European Commission and the governments of the EU-member countries to the European growth and employment problems. These guidelines have been the major EU-economic policy concept for around ten years now. They can be seen as a...

This paper provides background information and basic descriptive statistics for a representative survey of the New Zealand population conducted on our behalf by Research New Zealand in May 2016. The survey addresses important fiscal and monetary policy issues, including: (1) public preferences...

This paper investigates whether the socioeconomic status of the head of government helps explain fiscal performance. Applying sociological research that attributes differences in people's ways of thinking and acting to their relative standing within society, we test whether the social status of...