We study the effects of aging population on the sustainability of fiscal policy in overlapping generations models with government debt and a pay-as-you-go pension system. The smaller the population growth rate, the lower the maximum sustainable level of deficits. When the utility function is of...

The volume collects the essays presented at the 15th Workshop on Public Finance organised by Banca d'Italia in Perugia from 4 to 6 April 2013. The workshop focused on the link between fiscal policy and macroeconomic imbalances and comprised four sessions. The first session concentrated on the...

Does the state of the business cycle matter for the effects of fiscal policy shocks on GDP? This study analyses quarterly German data from 1976 to 2009 in a threshold SVAR, expanding the SVAR approach by Blanchard and Perotti (2002). In a linear benchmark SVAR, the analysis finds that hiking...

This paper examines why fiscal policy is procyclical in developing as well as developed countries. We introduce the concept of fiscal transparency into a model of retrospective voting, in which a political agency problem between voters and politicians generates a procyclical bias in government...

In this paper we analyze how the availability of credit influences the relationship between government size as a proxy for fiscal stabilization policy and the amplitude of business cycle fluctuations in a sample of advanced OECD countries. Interpreting relatively low loan-tovalue ratios as an...

The objective of the article is to identify impact of economic policy implications on current financial and economic crisis. The analysis examines a hypothesis that the main causes of financial and economic crisis include unbalanced developments of the macroeconomic sphere as well as existing...

In this paper we show how a rich variety of dynamical behaviors can emerge in the standard Keynesian income-expenditure model when a nonlinearity is introduced, both in the cases with and without endogenous government spending. A specific sigmoidal functional form is used for the adjustment...

In der modernen Konjunkturtheorie sind Konjunkturzyklen als Schwankungen des Auslastungsgrades des gesamtwirtschaftlichen Produktionspotentials definiert. Das ifo Institut veröffentlicht im Rahmen des ifo Konjunkturtests originäre vierteljährliche Daten über die Kapazitätsauslastung im...

Die hier präsentierten Berechnungen zeigen, dass das ifo Geschäftsklima in der gewerblichen Wirtschaft mit einem Markov-Switching-(MS-)Ansatz modelliert werden kann. Mit diesem MS-Modell können die Wendepunkte der zyklischen Komponente des realen Bruttoinlandsprodukts zuverlässig und mit...