We investigate the relevance of the characteristics of the Ministers of Finance in influencing, via their implementation of fiscal policies, the developments, in stock returns, sovereign yields and fiscal outcomes. For a panel of 27 EU countries, covering the period 1980-2012, we find that...

The paper analyses the linkages from financial developments to public finances. It maps and discusses the transmission channels to fiscal variables. These channels include asset prices, financing conditions, balance sheets of banks, non-banks and central banks and international linkages. The...

We show that fiscal multiplier estimations may be biased by movements in asset and credit markets, as they facilitate spurious correlations of changes in cyclically adjusted revenues and spending with GDP growth via an identification bias and an omitted variable bias, thus overstating episodes...