How large are government spending and tax multipliers? The fiscal proxy-SVAR literature provides heterogenous estimates, depending on which proxies - fiscal or non-fiscal - are used to identify fiscal shocks. We reconcile the existing estimates via a flexible vector autoregressive model that...

This paper provides some further tests for the proposition that a larger public sector leads to smaller output volatility. Both Gali and Fatas & Mihov have provided some evidence which appears to support this proposition. Their evidence is, however, based on a relatively small sample of...

This paper deals with the fiscal behaviour of governments in the 1920s and 1930s.The intention is to see whether there were the same features in government behaviour as in the post-World War II era.In particular, attention is paid to asymmetric fiscal policies, ie the question of whether...

Shocks to monetary and fiscal policy have played a major role in public debt developments in the OECD countries since the mid-1970s. According to the applied VAR approach, these shocks, taken together, explained, on average, about half of the forecast error variation in the debt to GDP ratio,...

This study explores discretionary fiscal policies in the euro area during the time of monetary union (EMU). Ex ante budget plans and policy changes during budget implementation are investigated using real time data from the OECD Economic Outlook publications. The particular focus of the study is...

This study explores real time uncertainty in euro area fiscal policies since the late 1990s. Using real time data from the OECD Economic Outlook publications we investigate the impact of real time uncertainty on fiscal planning and debt accumulation separately for two country groups in the euro...

In this essay we study the optimal noncoordinated fiscal policy in a monetary union, where a common and independent monetary authority commits to optimally set the union-wide nominal interest rate. The national governments in the monetary union implement independent fiscal policies by choosing...