Among the Great Recession costs there was the adoption of fiscal policies, generally bounded to increase government debt. In the Oecd area, however, the resulting debt jump was not simply due to counter-cyclical discretion, mostly because of two reasons: the first is that such policies were not...

In this paper we suggest a new measure of discretionary government spending for OECD countries over the period 1980-2011. To identify the components of discretionary expenditure, we use the volatility and persistence properties of the expenditure series. Discretionary policy cannot be inertial...

In this paper we suggest a new measure of discretionary government spending for OECD countries over the period 1980-2011. To identify the components of discretionary expenditure, we use the volatility and persistence properties of the expenditure series. Discretionary policy cannot be inertial...

Cyclical contractions differ from recession phases that are not only much less frequent but also more volatile. A major implication involves fiscal policy stance which in the Oecd area is dominated by automatical responses. Fiscal automatism explains why government spending is often procyclical...

In this paper we compare in a consistent way micro and macro labor supply elasticities. The individual elasticity is obtained from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The aggregate, time-series, elasticity is estimated from the exact aggregation of the individual units in the PSID, each...