This paper offers a brief overview of the research activities of the National Bank of Belgium with respect to so-called structural or cyclically-adjusted fiscal indicators. In making any form of fiscal assessment, it is essential to have an unbiased measure of the real policy stance. It is...

The paper focuses on the effects of fiscal policy on the industry-specific profit margin of a sector of an economy. This is a deviation from the existing literature, which focuses mainly on the effects of fiscal policy on the profit margin of the economy as a whole. In this work the price cost...

"Big G" typically refers to aggregate government spending on a homogeneous good. In this paper, we open up this construct by analyzing the entire universe of procurement contracts of the US government and establish five facts. First, government spending is granular; that is, it is concentrated...