This paper deals with the debt-growth relationship using several time-series tools. The idea is to find out whether the inverse relationship between these variable can be detected without imposing any functional forms for the estimating relationship and whether the relationship does indeed...

This paper studies uncertainty using the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters’ data. We consider both inflation and real GDP growth forecasts at the micro level and explore forecast uncertainty using two alternative measures, i.e. conventional standard deviation of individual point forecasts...

Building on the work of Sorge and Virolainen (2006), we revisit the data on aggregate Finnish bank loan losses from the corporate sector, which covers the ‘Big Five’ crisis in Finland in the early 1990s. Several extensions to the empirical model are considered. These extensions are then used...

This paper provides some further tests for the proposition that bigger government leads to smaller output volatility. Both Gali and Fatas and Mihov have provided some evidence which appears to provide support to this proposition. The evidence is, however, based on relatively small sample of...

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Purpose – To analyse productivity of public expenditures; especially to find out the effect of human capital investment on private sector productivity. Design/methodology/approach – Several measures of public sector capital stock are constructed. These measures are used in testing the...

This paper deals with the question of how consumption taxes, especially the value-added tax, affect consumption prices. The analyses are based on data from EU countries for the period 1970–2004. The starting point is a conventional supply-demand analysis of the tax incidence problem. This...