This paper reviews the rationales and facts about corporate tax coordination in Europe. Although statutory tax rates have dramatically declined, revenues collected from corporate taxation are fairly stable and there is so far no evidence of a race-to-the-bottom. The ambiguous results from...

This paper discusses an approach to estimate euro area GDP quarterly growth over two quarters ahead. The estimates are derived from separate single equations for each quarter to be forecast using OLS including a moving error term. The explanatory variables describe real economic activity or its...

With the establishment of the EMU and the ECB, the interaction between monetary and fiscal polices is now a major policy issue in the Euro-area, dealt with in detail in the Maastricht and Amsterdam treaties and in the Stability and Growth Pact. This paper provides a background to this issue by...

The paper contributes to the debate on the stability/efficiency tradeoff of automatic stabilizers. A simple AD-AS two-country model is presented and illustrates circumstances where a reduction in taxes can foster stabilization. The testable implication from the model is that tax cuts can either...

The paper introduces an approximate dynamic factor model based on the extraction of principal components from a very large number of leading indicators stacked at various lags. The model is designed to produce short-term forecasts that are computed with the EM algorithm implemented with the...

This paper aims at examining wage compression in Europe using the publicly available data on wages drawn from the Structure of Earnings Survey 2002. By wage compression, it is meant here that the difference in productivity across workers or firms is only partly reflected by the difference in...

Most of the reforms discussed within the framework of the Lisbon strategy will benefit public finances in the long term. However, in the short-term, there could a trade-off between some structural reforms and budgetary discipline. This possible tension between reforms and fiscal discipline was...

This paper presents a DSGE model with residential investment and credit-constrained households estimated with US data over the period 1980Q1-2008Q4. In order to better understand speculative movements of house prices, we model land as an exhaustible resource, implying that house prices have...

We use a policy rule framework and focus on the response of the primary surplus to accumulated public debt to test a sufficient condition for sustainability. The evidence we report suggests that sustainability was prevalent in many EU countries before Maastricht, but also that the Maastricht...

This paper reviews the first five years of experience with the working of the EMU framework for fiscal policy in EMU. It is argued that the balance with the fiscal framework of EMU so far is mixed. The EMU framework has contributed to avoid large fiscal imbalances in EU Member States and has...