Government expenditure can be highly variable, if used as a countercyclical instrument, or as a response to economic crises or as a means of rapidly altering other features of the economy. An alternative policy setting is to keep government expenditure changes gradual and modest. It is shown...

We empirically assess the impact of competitiveness measured by unit labor costs for current account balances in the Euro area. For this purpose, we estimate a panel with annual observations from 2000 to 2013. Our findings confirm the importance of competitiveness: Higher unit labor costs growth...

This paper studies the wasteful effect of bureaucracy on the economy by addressing the link between opportunistic behavior of government bureaucrats and the public sector wage bill. In particular, public officials are modeled as individuals competing for a larger share of those public funds. A...

This paper studies the impact of financial sector size and leverage on business cycles and risk-free rates dynamics. We model a general equilibrium productive economy where financial intermediaries provide costly risk mitigation to households by pooling the idiosyncratic risks of their...

This paper uses Brazilian quarterly data, from the period January/2002 to June/2015, to estimate the impact of taxes over gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. The econometric results show a negative and statistically significant impact of the overall tax burden over per capita GDP. In...

We provide an early assessment of the Juncker Commission's contributions to the ongoing reform of the euro area. In doing so, we present a chronological summary of the reform process up to 2014. At the time, the euro area architecture had undergone many changes. These were mainly focused on risk...

Auch 30 Jahre nach der Wiedervereinigung gibt es große wirtschaftliche Differenzen zwischen dem westlichen und östlichen Landesteil. Ostdeutschland erreichte zuletzt durchschnittlich knapp 70 Prozent des westdeutschen Bruttoinlandsprodukts je Einwohner, mit Berlin sind es rund drei Viertel des...

The article presents the use of the ARDL model to identify military expenditure determinants of the Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia). Factors influencing military expenditure include the variables characterizing the economic environment of the analyzed countries (GDP per Capita,...

We analyse Italy's growth pattern from 2001 to 2019 using the demand and growth regime categories proposed in the post-Keynesian tradition and recently adopted in the comparative political economy (CPE) literature. We argue that Italy followed an export-led recovery strategy after the Global...

The measures imposed by the governments to stop the spreading of SARS-CoV-2 virus, especially those referring to the mandatory character of physical distancing, determined more and more organizations to introduce teleworking, starting with March 2020. This paper analyses the factors that...