Since the financial crisis in 2008, controversy has existed over whether governments should use fiscal policy in an attempt to stimulate economic activity, or whether fiscal consolidation is preferred. Those who call for continued stimulation focus on how slow and incompletely shared our...

In this paper we construct financial conditions indices (FCIs) for the euro area, for the period 2003 to 2011, using a wide range of prices, quantities, spreads and survey data, grounded in the theoretical literature. One FCI includes monetary policy variables, whilst two versions without...

The purpose of Chapter 3 is to convince the reader that the Continental dollar was a zero-interest bearer bond and not a fiat currency—thereby overturning 230 years of scholarly interpretation; to show that the public and leading Americans knew and acted on this fact, and to illustrate the...

This paper deals with the problems of assessing the effects of fiscal policy in the European Monetary Union. Here, we face wide cross-country differences in key fiscal parameters, some of which may also be vary over time (business cycle). Moreover, these effects may also depend on trade...

This paper investigates the effciency of monetary and fiscal policy in a two-country general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition and wage stickiness. When monopoly distortions are completely eliminated, we find that stochastic government spending can affect the efficiency of global...

When countries decide to coordinate and form a coalition, an outsider country can take advantage of the situation and gain more than an insider, hence creating a free-rider problem that could threaten the stability of the coalition. But as far as the Euro zone is concerned, the emphasis put on...

Economic policies in several major countries have shifted from fiscal stimulus to austerity in the last few years. They seek to reduce fiscal deficits and reverse the increasing trend of public debt mainly through immediate spending cuts. The fact that fiscal austerity is applied simultaneously...

In times of fiscal stress, governments fail to adjust fiscal policy in line with the requirements for debt sustainability. Under these circumstances, monetary policy impacts the probability of sovereign default alongside inflation dynamics. Uribe (2006) studies the relationship between inflation...

This paper examines monetary and fiscal interactions in a framework where the government worries about political costs of low institutional quality and central bank opacity acts as a disciplinary device leading the government to reduce distortionary taxes and public expenditures. Greater opacity...

This paper studies the efficient taxation of money and factor income in intertemporal optimizing growth models with infinite horizons, transaction costs technologies and flexible prices.  Second-best optimality calls for a positive inflation tax and a non-zero capital income tax when there are...