The main focus of this paper is the relation between the cyclical components of total revenues and expenditures and the budget balance in France, Germany, Portugal, and Spain. We try to uncover past trends behind the development of public finances that contribute to explaining the current stance...

The main focus of this paper is the relation between the cyclical components of total revenues and expenditures and the budget balance in France, Germany, Portugal, and Spain. We try to uncover past trends behind the development of public finances that contribute to explaining the current stance...

This paper assesses how forecasting experts form their expectations about futuregovernment bond spreads. Using monthly survey forecasts for France, Italy and theUnited Kingdom between January 1993 and October 2014, we test whether respondentsconsider the expected evolution of the fiscal...

The global financial crisis rapidly spread across borders and financial markets, and also distressed EU bond markets. The crisis did not hit all markets in the same way. We measure the strength and direction of linkages between 16 EU sovereign bond markets using a factor-augmented version of the...

The global financial crisis rapidly spread across borders and financial markets, and also distressed EU bond markets. The crisis did not hit all markets in the same way. We measure the strength and direction of linkages between 16 EU sovereign bond markets using a factor-augmented version of the...

Budget forecasts have become increasingly important as a tool of fiscal management to influence expectations of bond markets and the public at large. The inherent difficulty in projecting macroeconomic variables – together with political bias – thwart the accuracy of budget forecasts.We...

Highly centralised countries like Italy and Spain have devolved fiscal power to regions in an asymmetric way. Some well-off regions get transfers that turn them into net recipients of the fiscal system. We demonstrate in a political economy model of fiscal federalism that in centralised...

A key strategic issue for banks is the implementation of internet banking. The 'click and mortar' model that complements classical branch banking with online facilities is competing with pure internet banks. The objective of this paper is to compare the performance of these two models across...

A key strategic issue for banks is the relative success of pure Internet banks and internet banking facilities offered by existing banks as part of an overall banking strategy (the click and mortar model). The object of the paper is to compare the performance of the two models across countries:...

We demonstrate that the cyclical behaviour of markups is related to the cyclical behaviour of government spending. For plausible parameter assumptions, pro-cyclical spending results in less counter-cyclical mark-ups. Evidence for thirteen OECD countries confirms a weak version of this hypothesis