Using the simple arithmetic of government budget constraint, we perform an analysis on the Italian case, investigating the consequences on the main public finance aggregates of the adoption of a fiscal policy rule responding to past real debt/GDP ratio. Such a rule, firmly grounded in the...

The objective of this paper is to investigate the optimality of EMU fiscal rules from a welfare perspective. We compute welfare-maximizing feedback coefficients for monetary and fiscal rules in a NK-DSGE with a high number of nominal and real distortions, calibrated on the Euro-area data. The...

This paper presents a New Economic Geography model with distortionary taxation and endogenized trade costs. Tax revenues finance a public good, infrastructure. We show that the introduction of costly public investment in infrastructure increases agglomerative tendencies. With respect to the...

We investigate the effects of fiscal policy on private consumption and investment in the European Union. A certain consensus has aroused that fiscal impulses have expansionary Keynesian effects on the economic activity. However, the existing empirical literature has concentrated on few...

Average hourly productivity has often been used to draw conclusions on long run per capita GDP growth, based on the assumption of full utilization of labour resources. In this paper, we argue that a failure to recognize the potentially significant wedges among the two variables – even in the...

We investigate the effects of fiscal policy on private consumption and investment in the European Union. A certain consensus has aroused that fiscal impulses have expansionary Keynesian effects on the economic activity. However, the existing empirical literature has concentrated on few...