We assess the impact of fiscal adjustments (and technology) on the evolution of markups in a panel of 14 OECD countries. We allow for smooth changes in the technological parameters by generating measures of TFP compatible with markups and assess the interaction between the two variables. Our...

Debt-financed fiscal stimulus programmes directly stimulate aggregate demand through government expenditure or tax cuts, but their effectiveness is highly dependent on direct crowding out of private sector expenditure, spillover effects to the private sector through a higher risk premium on...

This paper assesses the fiscal sustainability hypothesis for 10 Eastern and Central European countries (CEEC) between 1997 and 2019. The study adopts very recent panel econometric techniques which accounts for issues of structural breaks and cross-sectional dependence in the data generating...

The analysis of the macroeconomic impact of fiscal policies in the euro area has been traditionally limited by the absence of quarterly fiscal data. To overcome this problem, we provide two new databases in this paper. Firstly, we construct a quarterly database of euro area fiscal variables for...

The U.S. fiscal cliff has sparked renewed interest on the issue of fiscal sustainability. Using a time-varying parameter model with a longer data set (1916-2011), there is evidence that the response of primary surplus-income ratio to debt-GDP ratio shows (1) substantial variation over time, (2)...

The heightened interest of African countries to access international capital markets has put public debt sustainability once again high on the continent's policy agenda. Applying the ‘stabilizing primary balance approach' to sustainability shows that the primary balances exceeded those...

We demonstrate that the cyclical behaviour of markups is related to the cyclical behaviour of government spending. For plausible parameter assumptions, pro-cyclical spending results in less counter-cyclical mark-ups. Evidence for thirteen OECD countries confirms a weak version of this hypothesis

We compute average markups as a measure of market power throughout time and study their interaction with fiscal policy and macroeconomic variables in a VAR framework. From impulse-response functions, the results, with annual data for a set of 14 OECD countries, show that the markup (i) depicts a...

This paper introduces a Regime-Switching Model-Based Sustainability test allowing for periodic (or local) violations of Bohn (1998, QJE)'s sustainability condition. We assume a Markov-switching fiscal policy rule whose parameters stochastically switch between sustainable and unsustainable...

This paper investigates the unemployment effects of fiscal policy in Greece based on the SVAR methodology. We find evidence that the unemployment and growth effects can be quite sizeable in case of cuts in government purchases and in particular government consumption and to a lesser extent...