In an influential paper, Devries et al. (2011) construct narrative series of tax- and spending-based fiscal adjustments for a panel of OECD countries. In this paper, we find that the adjustments based on spending cuts can be predicted on the basis of past output growth and other macroeconomic...

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...

This paper examines the asymptotic and finite-sample properties of tests of equal forecast accuracy when the models being compared are overlapping in the sense of Vuong (1989). Two models are overlapping when the true model con- tains just a subset of variables common to the larger sets of...