We study the relevance of fiscal rules for growth in an EU panel. Our results show that they foster growth, while stricter fiscal rules mitigate the adverse impact on growth from big governments. Moreover, more recent EU member states have gained from the implementation of fiscal rules.

This paper investigates the sustainability of fiscal policy in a set of 19 countries by taking a longer-run secular perspective over the period 1880-2009. Via a systematic analysis of the stationarity properties of the first-differenced level of government debt, and disentangling the components...

We assess the relevance of budgetary components for private and public investment using data for a panel of 95 countries for the period 1970-2008, and accounting for the usually encountered econometric pitfalls. Our results show a positive effect attributed to total government expenditures and...

In an OCDE panel, for the period 1970-2010, we assess the effects of fiscal consolidation episodes, with four different definitions. Our results reveal that lower final government consumption would increase private consumption in three out of the four approaches, when there is a fiscal...

This study estimates the effects of the immigration stock, as well as those of immigrants’ characteristics, such as having the same language as that of the host country and the level of qualification or entrepreneurship, on Portuguese intra-industry trade (IIT) by types, controlling for the...

A SAM (Social Accounting Matrix) approach can be an important aid for the modelling of economic policy and a valuable support in the decision-making process, since it provides a description of the measurable part of a society’s activity. Richard Stone made the first and most fundamental...

We construct a growth model with an explicit government role, where more government resources reduce the optimal level of private consumption and of output per worker. In the empirical analysis, for a panel of 108 countries from 1970-2008, we use different proxies for government size and...

We investigate how the strength of the positive association between frequency of trading and information acquisition is dependent on investors’ self-confidence and on the sources of information used by investors. Our results confirm that the more frequently individual investors invest in...

This paper describes the implementation of a new protocol for the regular economics seminar run by the Economics Department of ISEG and the research center UECE during academic year 2010-2011. The main innovative features of this protocol were: the introduction of a discussant that explains the...

We measure the success of fiscal consolidation, with alternative definitions, based on ad-hoc quantitative approaches and on a policy-action approach. The cyclically adjusted primary balance, and the duration of the consolidation contribute for its success, and the opposite applies for revenue...