The need of fiscal consolidation is likely to dominate the policy agenda in the next decade; starting from statistical evidence on the conduct of fiscal policy in the EMU area over the last decade, this paper addresses the optimality of alternative fiscal consolidation strategies. We explore the...

Macroeconomic literature has traditionally regarded public expenditure as yielding no utility per se to any agent in the economy. In line with a few previous contributions (Linneman and Schabert 2004, Bouakez and Rebei 2007) we build a New Keynesian DSGE model with real and nominal rigidities...