Traditionally, fiscal data for policy analysis are derived from official reports that, depending on the country, are published either monthly, quarterly or annually, often with significant time lags. However, innovations in digitalization of government payments and accounting systems mean that...

This paper studies the fiscal implications for the Beninese economy of scaling up of public investment when the government is subject to inefficiencies on the spending and on the tax collection side. While scaling up of public investments results in higher long-run output and consumption levels,...

The Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) has extensively treated the adverse effects of climate change and the appropriate mitigation policy. We extend such a model to include optimal policies for mitigation, adaptation and infrastructure investment studying the dynamics of the transition to a low...

We build a factor-augmented interacted panel vector-autoregressive model of the Euro Area (EA) and estimate it with Bayesian methods to compute government spending multipliers. The multipliers are contingent on the overall monetary policy stance, captured by a shadow monetary policy rate. In the...

We argue that in an economy with downward nominal wage rigidity, the output gap is negative on average. Because it is more difficult to cut wages than to increase them, firms reduce employment more during downturns than they increase employment during expansions. This is demonstrated in a simple...

We study the properties of the IMF-WEO estimates of real-time output gaps for countries in the euro area as well as the determinants of their revisions over 1994-2017. The analysis shows that staff typically saw economies as operating below their potential. In real time, output gaps tend to have...