We show that search volume on Google not only serves as an intuitive proxy for overall firm recognition, but also captures the attention of stock market investors. Our results suggest that an increase in search queries is associated with a rise in trading activity and stock liquidity. We...

The global financial and economic crisis has revived the debate in the academic literature and in policy circles about the size and effectiveness of automatic fiscal stabilizers. Especially in the euro area where monetary policy is centralized and discretionary fiscal policy making is...

We show that the search volume on Google not only serves as an intuitive proxy for overall recognition in a firm, but also captures the attention of stock market investors. Our results suggest that an increase in search queries is associated with a rise in trading activity and stock liquidity....

Real-time estimates of potential output are used for the calculation of the cyclically-adjusted budget balance, one of the main indicators in the assessment of the fiscal performance of EU Member States. The estimation of potential output involves a decomposition of actual output into a cyclical...

The failure of key EU Member States to respect the provisions of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) a few years after its inception triggered a heated debate on how to reform the framework of fis-cal policy coordination in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). This paper analyzes 101 reform...

The model presented in the paper makes use of the portfolio theory as well as its econometric transposition for estimating the yield structure of different financial-asset investments. As the supply of financial assets is not assumed to be perfectly elastic the demand for alternative assets...

Theoretical arguments and empirical evidence are presented to prove the poor quality of the structural budget balance in assessing the effectiveness of budget consolidation efforts. Changes in the structural budget balance currently used as an indicator of fiscal stance give a significantly...

This paper examines economic policy interactions in the Economic and Monetary Union when the assessment of cyclical conditions in real time is surrounded by uncertainty. On the basis of a simple stylised model it shows that with a Nash-type of interaction different views about the output gap on...

In current practice, changes in the cyclically-adjusted budget balance (CAB) are interpreted as reflecting the effort of discretionary fiscal policy. This paper shows that such an interpretation is not a sufficiently accurate description of the behaviour of fiscal policy, as, in some cases, it...

Fiscal policymakers are expected to conduct countercyclical policies to mitigate cyclical fluctuations of output, but the assessment of cyclical conditions in real time is subject to considerable uncertainty. They face two types of risk: (i) launching discretionary measures to support or dampen...