Due to the occurrence of fiscal foresight, conventional fiscal VAR models are naturally inclined to suffer from the phenomena of nonfundamentalness and noncausality, which may imply biased estimates. These problems have been widely identified in the fiscal literature, however until recently...

This paper is focused on the options for reducing the U.S. fiscal deficit in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The first part of the paper is devoted to an assessment of the economic outlook and the impact of the financial crisis on the medium-term fiscal balance of the federal government....

This Strategic Analysis paper provides an analysis of the medium-term forces behind economic growth since 1980, showing that the authors' previous work, grounded in the linkages between growth and the financial balances of the private, public, and foreign sectors of the economy, has proven a...

This paper develops new error assessment methods to evaluate the performance of debt sustainability analyses (DSAs) for low-income countries (LICs) from 2005-2015. We find some evidence of a bias towards optimism for public and external debt projections, which was most appreciable for LICs with...

Legislative and implementation lags imply that substantial time evolves between when news arrives about fiscal changes and when the changes actually take place -- time when households and firms can adjust their behavior. We identify two types of fiscal news -- government spending using the...

The world economy has been struck by Covid-19 the same way people are struck by a lightning, fast and without warning, leaving nations out to dry on little to no reserves on their crucial supply side. Consequently, over the past year, economies shrunk, production drastically diminished, and...

Against a backdrop of debt ratio targets being central to recent proposed changes to the EU fiscal rules, we examine errors in official forecasts of the General Government debt ratios and their determinants in 26 member states from 2012 to 2019 when the "six pack" rules applied. We find debt...

The first official data releases of quarterly real GDP for the euro area are published about eight weeks after the end of the reference quarters. Meanwhile, ongoing economic developments must be assessed from various, more readily available, monthly indicators. We examine in the context of...

The National Economic Institute in Iceland was a government institute responsible for producing and publishing a national economic forecast. The institute was closed in 2002. This paper measures the accuracy of the institute's forecasts from 1981-2002. The paper measures the accuracy of the GDP...

I present evidence that the linear mixed-frequency Bayesian VAR provides very sharp and well calibrated monthly real-time recession probabilities for the euro area for the period from 2004 until 2013. The model outperforms not only the univariate regime-switching models for a number of hard and...