In 1974 Britain elected a Labour government pledged to expand public spending significantly. Labour followed its programme for two years, but after that began to cut both government spending and taxation, anticipating the post-1979 Conservative agenda. This paper examines the history of this...

Die Forderung nach höherer Transparenz und besserer Wirkungsorientierung von Subventionen ist ein finanzpolitischer Evergreen, der mit der Schuldenbremse und der Forderung nach langfristiger Tragfähigkeit der Finanzpolitik, zusätzliche Dringlichkeit erhält. Die im Auftrag des...

We estimate the sticky information Phillips curve model of Mankiw and Reis (2002) using survey expectations of professional forecasters from four major European economies. Our estimates imply that inflation expectations in France, Germany and the United Kingdom are updated about once a year, in...

We investigate the effects of UK monetary policy from 1974-2001 using a structural vector autoregression with quarterly data. We adapt Uhlig's (2001) sign restriction identification methodology and show that shocks which can reasonably be described as monetary policy shocks have played a very...

Standard zero-lower-bound New Keynesian models generate large fiscal multipliers and expansionary negative supply shocks. Thus, according to these models, a political party that implements fiscal contraction coupled with policies to increase aggregate supply should unambiguously cause economic...

This paper analyzes the impact of demographic change on the sustainability of fiscal policy. Firstly, we study the main causes of the deterioration of Japanese government fiscal conditions from the demographic point of view. Next, we investigate the impact of Korean population aging on the...

Did austerity cause Brexit? This paper shows that the rise of popular support for the UK Independence Party (UKIP), as the single most important correlate of the subsequent Leave vote in the 2016 European Union (EU) referendum, along with broader measures of political dissatisfaction, are...

Using estimates of support for Leave across UK local authority areas constructed from a comprehensive 20,000 strong survey, we show that both the level and the geographic variation capturing differential degrees of support for Leave have changed significantly since the 2016 EU referendum. A lot...

We apply the Kakwani approach to decomposing redistributive effect into average rate, progressivity, and reranking components using yearly UK data covering 1977-2018. We examine cash and in-kind benefits, and direct and indirect taxes. In addition, we highlight an empirical implementation issue...

Using information collected by the National Audit Office, a comparison of several aspects of performance on recent Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contracts is conducted. The first aspect is a sector by sector comparison of refinancing profits, bearing in mind differential risk levels and in...