This paper contains a set of tests for nonlinearities in economic time series. The tests comprise both standard diagnostic tests for revealing nonlinearities and some new developments in modelling nonlinearities. The latter test procedures make use of models in chaos, theory, so-called...

This paper deals with fiscal policy coordination. In particular, it focuses on the question of how fiscal policy can be coordinated inside EMU, where countries still differ considerably in terms of cyclical behaviour and importance of country-specific shocks and well as the fiscal policy...

This paper tries to assess fiscal policy rules in the OECD countries. In particular, we examine whether the EU/EMU countries have had the same rule in terms of the cyclical situation. The analysis is based on a simple VAR model for output growth, inflation and a fiscal indicator. Empirical...

This paper provides an extended supply of labour model which allows for different intensities of legal and illegal (criminal) activities and in which criminal activities may be considered both as work and leisure. Heterogeneity of individuals is also taken into account. The model is estimated...

This paper develops a model of the relationship between public sector employment, total output and aggregate real demand in market prices, where public employment has a positive productivity effect on private output and where public employment crowds out private employment and output via wage...

This paper deals with the question whether the automatic fiscal stabilisers are strong enough to solve the problem of asymmetric shocks in the Euro area. The question is important for many reasons, for instance in terms of policy coordination and fiscal federalism. The paper reviews the current...

This paper presents a review of OECD forecasts for the G7 countries for the period 1969 - 1997. The analysis deals with the magnitude, auto-correlation and eventual bias of the errors. In addition, we scrutinize the cyclical behavior of errors and try to identify the relationships between...

This paper analyses the productivity of public expenditures. It follows the branch of literature originated by Aschauer but has also some novel features. First of all, it focuses on the effect of both public investment and public consumption (investment part of public consumption) on private...

This paper analyses the economic determinants of suicide. More specifically, we test the hypothesis that suicide is related to shocks or news concerning income growth. Testing is based on an error correction model of suicide in which the long-run part takes into account various demographic and...

This paper discusses the fiscal behaviour of EU countries in 1972-1999. It attempts to find out how deficits adjust to changes in interest rates and output growth by examining the hypothesis that the reaction of deficits to output growth is non-linear: relatively small in "good times" and quite...