After the global financial crisis, some governments in the EU experienced serious debt financing problems, while others were less affected. This paper seeks to shed light on the divergent fiscal performance by assessing the fiscal conduct in the EU countries before and after the outbreak of the...

This paper is an empirical study that aims at explaining economic fluctuations and behavior mark-up. Inspired by the method of Roeger (1995), we perform a study of four OECD countries (Denmark, Finland, Italy and the United States) for 17 manufacturing industries covering the period 1986-2008....

The global financial and economic crisis has revived the debate in the academic literature and in policy circles about the size and effectiveness of automatic fiscal stabilisers. Especially in the euro area where monetary policy is centralised and discretionary fiscal policy making is...

Summary for non-specialistsThis paper uses a multi-region dynamic general equilibrium model with collateral constrained households and residential investment to examine the effectiveness of fiscal policy. The presence of credit constrained households makes fiscal policy a more powerful tool for...

The article presents an analysis on the budget balance as a key indicator of the fiscal sector processes. The text considers different techniques for its funding - from the fiscal reserve and via government debt. Total government revenues and expenditures, with their respective structure and...

This paper studies the wasteful effect of bureaucracy on the economy by addressing the link between rent-seeking behavior of government bureaucrats and the public sector wage bill, which is taken to represent the rent component. In particular, public officials are modeled as individuals...

Motivated by the high public employment, and the public wage premia observed in Europe, a Real-Business-Cycle model, calibrated to German data (1970-2007), is set up with a richer government spending side, and an endogenous private-public sector labor choice. To illustrate the effects of fiscal...

Motivated by the highly-unionized public sectors, the high public shares in total em- ployment, and the public sector wage premia observed in Europe, this paper examines the importance of public sector unions for macroeconomic theory. The model gen- erates cyclical behavior in hours and wages...

This paper examines whether efficiency considerations require that optimal labour income taxation is progressive or regressive in a model with skill heterogeneity, endogenous skill acquisition and a production sector with capital-skill complementarity. We find that wage inequality driven by the...

Recent work on optimal monetary and fiscal policy in New Keynesian models suggests that it is optimal to allow steady-state debt to follow a random walk. Leith and Wren-Lewis (2012) consider the nature of the timeinconsistency involved in such a policy and its implication for discretionary...