Government forecasts of GDP growth and budget balances are generally more over-optimistic than private sector forecasts …; meanwhile private sector forecasters were not subject to this crude bias. As a result, using private sector forecasts as an … input into the government budgeting-making process would probably reduce official forecast errors for budget deficits …

The recent debt crises in Europe and the U.S. states feature similar sharp increases in spreads on government debt but … also show important differences. In Europe, the crisis occurred at high government indebtedness levels and had spillovers … to the private sector. In the United States, state government indebtedness was low, and the crisis had no spillovers to …

We measure the amount of smoothing achieved through various components of the government deficit in EU and OECD … countries. For EU countries, at the 1-year frequency percent of shocks to GDP are smoothed via government consumption, 18 …. Government transfers provide more smoothing of negative than of positive shocks among EU countries. There seems to be no trade …

explained by appeal to transitory increases in government spending. We suggest that in several countries the slow rate at which …. There is a clear tendency for larger deficits in countries characterized by a by a short average tenure of government and by …