This paper examines the possibility that, contrary to conventional wisdom, capital controls accelerate currency crises. Theoretical analysis shows that capital controls can constitute an additional burden on government budget and so bring forward the onset of crises. Since perfect capital...

This paper explores primarily the level of international competitiveness of Greece and the degree of fit between the conditions prescribed by the optimal currency areas (OCA) theory with the actual situation in Greece. Given that Greece now shares the same currency with Germany, the de facto...

We study the dynamic output and welfare effects of public infrastructure investment under a balanced budget fiscal rule, using an overlapping generations model of a small open economy. The government finances public investment by employing distortionary labor taxes. We find a negative short-run...

American fiscal policy has been procyclical: Washington wasted the expansion period 2001-2007 by running budget deficits, but by 2011 had come to feel constrained by inherited debt to withdraw fiscal stimulus. Chile has achieved countercyclical fiscal policy – saving in booms and easing in...

Spillovers resulting from fiscal and monetary policy are compared and analysed in small static, small dynamic and large dynamic multi-country models. To compare the size of the spillovers, we consider simulations in which GDP for a certain number of years is held one percent above base in the...

Emerging market economies typically exhibit a procyclical fiscal policy: public expenditures rise (fall) in economic expansions (recessions), whereas tax rates rise (fall) in bad (good) times. Additionally, the business cycle of these economies is characterized by countercyclical default risk....

This paper studies the effectiveness of Euro Area (EA) fiscal policy, during the recent financial crisis, using an estimated New Keynesian model with a bank. A key dimension of policy in the crisis was massive government support for banks — that dimension has so far received little attention...

We estimate spillover effects of a fiscal shock in one member country in the euro area on outputs of the rest of the members, using a Global Vector Autoregression (GVAR) model. We compare the effects of a domestic fiscal shock with those of a similar size area-wide shock expressed as a weighted...

This paper studies how the effects of government spending vary with the economic environment. Using a panel of OECD countries, we identify fiscal shocks as residuals from an estimated spending rule and trace their macroeconomic impact under different conditions regarding the exchange rate...

We analyze fiscal policy procyclicality in resource-rich countries. We obtain a strong U-shaped relationship between the procyclicality of government capital expenditures and the resource richness measure comprised of the mineral exports share in total merchandise exports for developing...