Using a panel of 54 countries between 1980 and 2013, we find empirical support for the view that changes in the fiscal policy stance (year-on-year change in the cyclically adjusted primary balance) have a significant positive correlation with inflation volatility. An increase in the volatility...

We study a panel of 17 economies in the first wave of globalization, between 1870 and 1914, regarding the fiscal consequences of deflation. By means of impulse response analyses and panel regressions, we find that a 1 percent fall in the price level leads to an increase in the debt ratio of...

We assess notably how do extreme events affect the public sector efficiency of decentralized governance. Hence, we empirically link the public sector efficiency scores, to tax revenue and spending decentralization. First, we compute government spending efficiency scores via data envelopment...

We assess the impact of announcements corresponding to different fiscal and monetary policy measures on the 10-year sovereign bond yield spreads (relative to Germany) of the 10 EMU countries during the period 01:1999 - 07:2016. Implementing pooled and country-fixed effects OLS regressions, we...

This paper investigates the sustainability of fiscal policy in a set of 19 countries by taking a longer-run secular perspective over the period 1880-2009. Via a systematic analysis of the stationarity properties of the first-differenced level of government debt, and disentangling the components...

This paper proposes a dynamic politico-economic theory of debt, government finance and expenditure. Agents have preferences over a private and a government-provided public good, financed through labor taxation. Subsequent generations of voters choose taxation, government expenditure and debt...

We assess the sustainability of public finances in OECD countries, over the period 1970-2010, using unit root and cointegration analysis, both country and panel based, controlling for endogenous breaks. Results notably show: lack of cointegration – absence of sustainability – between...

This paper provides an analytical characterization of Markov perfect equilibria in a politico-economic model with repeated voting, where agents vote over distortionary income redistribution. The key feature of the theory is that the future constituency of redistributive policies depends...

We estimate fiscal responses for an OECD panel, accounting for cross-country interactions, and also estimate the fiscal responses in a panel VAR. We find that governments have increased primary balances when facing higher government indebtedness, implying a Ricardian fiscal regime, while primary...

We measure the success of fiscal consolidation, with alternative definitions, based on ad-hoc quantitative approaches and on a policy-action approach. The cyclically adjusted primary balance, and the duration of the consolidation contribute for its success, and the opposite applies for revenue...