During the next few decades the populations of most developed countries will grow older and older as a result of the low fertility rates since the 1970s and/or the continuously increasing life expectancy. Poland, one of the biggest countries in Central Europe, will be confronted rather seriously...

We investigate empirically the effect of government purchases on unemployment in 20 OECD countries, for the period 1960-2007. Compared to earlier studies we use a data set with more variation in unemployment, and which allows for controlling for a host of factors that influence the effect of...

This paper analyses the public finance performance and the dynamics of government expenditures on education and health in the Kyrgyz Republic in 2007- 2010, when the country was hit by the global economic crisis and then by an internal political crisis in 2010. Despite these crisis conditions,...

In contrast to Robert Mundell's Optimum Currency Area theory and his recommendation of forming a monetary union, the economic fundamentals of Euro area member countries have not harmonized. The opposite holds: the Euro core countries - most of all Germany, but also the Netherlands and Finland -...

This paper analyzes the importance of monetary and fiscal policy shocks in explaining US macroeconomic fluctuations, and establishes new stylized facts. The novelty of our empirical analysis is that we jointly consider both monetary and fiscal policy, whereas the existing literature only focuses...

It is often claimed that the presence of liquidity constrained households enhances the need for and the effects of fiscal stabilization policies. This paper studies this in a model of a small open economy with liquidity constrained households. The results show that the consequences of liquidity...

We present strong empirical evidence favoring the role of effective demand in the US economy, in the spirit of Keynes and Kalecki. Our inference comes from a statistically well-specified VAR model constructed on a quarterly basis from 1980 to 2008. US output is our variable of interest, and it...

This paper documents the systematic response of postwar U.S. fiscal policy to fiscal imbalances and the business cycle using a multivariate Fiscal Taylor Rule. Adjustments to taxes and purchases both account for a large portion of the fiscal response to debt, while authorities seem reluctant to...

This paper investigates the implications of alternative scale variables of money demand for the comparison of a flexible exchange rate regime with a monetary union in a NOEM setup. The welfare evaluation of exchange rate regimes depends on the exchange rate response under the flexible regime....

This study investigates the comparative effect of fiscal and monetary policy on economic growth in Pakistan using annual time series data from 1981 to 2009. The cointegration result suggests that both monetary and fiscal policy have significant and positive effect on economic growth. The...