The European Union (EU) accepted ten new member states (NMS) in 2004. These countries, mostly former socialist countries, have had to adjust their economic policies to the EU's standards. Perhaps most difficult has proven to be fiscal policy whereby NMS must comply with the Stability and Growth...

The Brexit vote precipitated the unravelling of the UK’s membership of the world’s deepest economic integration agreement. This paper reviews evidence on the realized economic effects of Brexit. The 2016 Brexit referendum changed expectations about future UK-EU relations. Studying its...

This paper considers the nature and the distribution of trade and FDI effects of a potential enlargement of the European Monetary Union (EMU) to the ten countries that obtained EU membership in 2004. One-way and two-way error component gravity models are estimated using a dataset of unbalanced...

This paper characterises rules-based fiscal policy setting. Basically, we translate a standard monetary policy rule into a simple fiscal policy rule. We then infer on fiscal policymakers' reaction coefficients by testing the rule with GMM. Interaction is also tested directly by the inclusion of...

The fiscal commons problem is one of the most prominent explanations of excessive spending and indebtedness in political economics. The more fragmented a government, the higher its spending, deficits and debt. In this paper we investigate to what extent this problem can be mitigated by different...

According to reputational models of political economy, a term limit may change the behavior of a chief executive because he does not have to stand for election. We test this hypothesis in a sample of 52 countries over the period 1977-2000, using government spending, social and welfare spending...

This paper presents a review of the most significant fiscal rules policymakers can choose from. The insights from this review are then applied to the current budgetary situation of the European Union. In the European Union, the supranational Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) should provide the...

In this paper, we track fiscal authority behaviour in the ten new EU member states (NSM) in the period which immediately preceded their EU accession. We first present basic stylized facts about public budgets of those countries. The paper then analyses reasons which led to periods of fiscal...

The empirical effectiveness of economic policies that operate theoretically through similar channels differs substantially. We document this fact by comparing an easy-to-grasp expectations-based policy, unconventional fiscal policy, with a policy whose implications are harder to understand by...

We explore the reaction of the euro area periphery sovereigns' fiscal positions to an unconventional monetary policy shock. We estimate panel vector autoregressive (VAR) models over the period 2010-2018, and identify the shock by imposing sign restrictions. Our results suggest that the...