The financial crisis of 2008/2009 has left European economies with a sizeable public debt stock bringing back the question what factors help to reduce these fiscal imbalances. Using data for the period 1985-2009 this paper identifies factors determining major public debt reductions. On average,...

Do public sector wages exert pressures on private sector wages, or has the private sector a leadership role in wage setting? This paper tries to isolate the pure signalling effect that one sector might exert on the other by controlling for other determinants of wages (prices, productivity,...

This paper investigates the in inflationary effects of fscal policy in an optimizing general equilibrium monetary model with capital accumulation, exible prices and wealth effects. The model is calibrated to Euro Area quarterly data. Simulation results show that government defcits, high debt...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, for West Germany, France, Italy and US, we econometrically select within a SVAR model some fiscal policy regimes, i.e. a u0094set of rulesu0094 for the implementation of fiscal policies. Second, we identify the fiscal policy shocks related to different...

Among the harmful effects of inflation, the negative consequences of inflation volatility are of particular concern. These include higher risk premia, hedging costs and unforeseen redistribution of wealth. This paper presents panel estimations for a sample of OECD countries which suggest that...

We use a Vector Auto Regression (VAR) analysis to explore the (spill-over) effects of fiscal policy shocks in Europe. To enhance comparability with the existing literature, we first analyse the effects of these shocks at the national level. Here, we employ identification based on Choleski...

The paper analyses the EU fiscal rules from a political economy perspective and derives some policy lessons. Following a literature survey, the paper stresses the importance of appropriate incentives for rule compliance in an environment where national fiscal sovereignty precludes the option of...

We compute average mark-ups as a measure of market power throughout time and study their interaction with fiscal policy and macroeconomic variables in a VAR framework. From impulse-response functions the results, with annual data for a set of 14 OECD countries covering the period 1970-2007, show...

The analysis of the macroeconomic impact of fiscal policies in the euro area has been traditionally limited by the absence of quarterly fiscal data. To overcome this problem, we provide two new databases in this paper. Firstly, we construct a quarterly database of euro area fiscal variables for...

We propose a monetary model in which the unemployed satisfy the official US definition of unemployment: they are people without jobs who are (i) currently making concrete efforts to find work and (ii) willing and able to work. In addition, our model has the property that people searching for...