The sovereign debt crisis in the euro area is a symptom of policy failures and deficiencies in – among other things – fiscal policy coordination. The first nine years of the euro were not used effectively in order to improve public finances, while the Stability and Growth Pact was watered...

Until the early 1990s, the discussions on fiscal policy primarily centered on the functions of economic stabilization, income redistribution and resource allocation. Long-term growth was not usually viewed as an end itself, and fiscal policy was often not sufficiently tailored to the different...

This paper develops an arbitrage-free affine term structure model of potentially defaultable sovereign bonds to model a cross-section of eight euro area government bond yield curves since January 1999. The existence of a common monetary policy under European Monetary Union determines the short...

Using real-time data from the annual budget over the period 1958-2009, we explore the planning and realization of fiscal policy in the Netherlands . Our key findings are the following. First, planned surpluses are on average unbiased, although they are overoptimistic during the first half of the...

This paper explores the determinants of deviations of ex-post budget outcomes from first-release outcomes published towards the end of the year of budget implementation. The predictive content of the first-release outcomes is important, because these figures are an input for the next budget and...

Fiscal consolidation is used as a synonym for austerity much as debt restructuring is used as a euphemism for partial repudiation. Inside the political arena of international economics, the nomenclature of government officials in policy debates adopts colorful terminology, such as healthy public...

If Sweden becomes member of the European currency union, the conditions for fiscal policy will change. The stabilization policy objectives will, however, hardly change with a membership. At the same time it is not clear if the need for stabilizing the Swedish economy will increase or decrease....

This paper investigates the relevance of the No-Ponzi game condition for public debt (i.e. the public debt growth rate has to be lower than the real interest rate, a necessary assumption for Ricardian equivalence) and of the transversality condition for the GDP growth rate (i.e. the GDP growth...

This paper develops an arbitrage-free affine term structure model of potentially defaultable sovereign bonds to model a cross-section of eight euro area government bond yield curves since January 1999. The existence of a common monetary policy under European Monetary Union determines the short...

This paper seeks to link the debate surrounding short-term fiscal multipliers with the medium and longer-term impact of fiscal consolidation on public debt sustainability. A literature review and empirical findings for state-dependent multipliers confirm that there is considerable uncertainty...