Effective macroeconomic and structural policies helped Turkey bounce back quickly and strongly from the global crisis, with annual growth averaging close to 9% over 2010-11. However, the current account deficit widened to around 10% of GDP in 2011 and consumer price inflation rose to over 10%....

The serious current account imbalances which have developed within the euro area over the last decade are at the core of the current financial crisis. For the members of the currency union fiscal policy has gained in importance due to the loss of monetary policy as an autonomous policy...

Recent empirical research into the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy shocks has generated a puzzle. Both Keynesian and Real Business Cycle models predict that a fiscal expansion will lead to a real exchange rate appreciation. However, in almost all the countries that have been studied,...

Emerging economies have been subject to abrupt reversals in capital inflows, which have adverse consequences for economic activity and financial stability. An important question for policymakers is how to respond to a sudden loss of external financing and its negative effects on the domestic...

The paper studies empirically fiscal policies around elections in 25 developing countries as affected by the exchange regime. It is argued that countries with flexible exchange regimes are less likely to engage in expansionary fiscal policies before elections because such policies can result in...

Central banks invest their foreign exchange reserves predominantly in government bonds. The global accumulation of reserves therefore affects the equilibrium in the market for government bonds of reserve currency countries. By means of a panel data analysis we examine the relationship between...

This paper deals with fiscal policy over the business cycle when international financial markets are imperfect. I document evidence that government expenditure tends to be more procyclical the higher is the borrowing cost for a sovereign. Decomposing government expenditure components shows that...

This paper studies the impact of the state-dependent risk of a government default on the correlation of the scal balance and current account. We use a small open economy model where nonlinear risk premia arise endogenously when the government operates close to its scal limit, i.e. the maximum...

We study fiscal policy in Denmark in the period 2004-2012 and compare the actual policy to counterfactual, rule-based alternatives. Given Denmark's fixed exchange rate towards the euro, it is the job of fiscal policymakers to stabilise fluctuations in output and inflation. However, we find that...

In a monetary union, the interaction between several governments and a single central bank is plagued by several sources of deficit bias, including common pool problems. Each government has strong preferences over local spending and taxation but suffers only part of the costs of union-wide...