Whether the likelihood of credit booms ending is dependent on its age or not, or whether the respective behaviour is smooth or bumpy are important issues to which the economic literature has not given attention yet. This paper tries to fill that gap in the literature, exploring those issues with...

This paper assesses the determinants of the length of fiscal consolidation using annual data for 17 industrial countries over the period 1978-2009. Relying on a narrative approach to identify fiscal consolidation episodes, we show that fiscal variables (such as the budget deficit and the level...

This paper analyses the presence of duration dependence in local governments’ tenure employing continuous and discrete-time duration analyses over a set of spells of time in office for the period 1979-2005. Our results show that the more time a party remains in office, the higher is the...

Building on a narrative approach to identify episodes of fiscal consolidation, data for a group of 17 industrial countries over the period 1978-2009 and both continuous-time and discrete-time duration models, we find evidence suggesting that the likelihood of a fiscal consolidation ending...

In this paper, we analyse the link between the macroeconomic developments and the banking credit risk in a particular group of countries – Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy (GIPSI) – recently affected by unfavourable economic and financial conditions and to which, on this matter,...

This paper examines the presence of political cycles inside the Portuguese governments’ aggregate expenditures by using annual data for 10 expenditure components. The results indicate that the choice of the expenditure components to be increased during election periods by Portuguese...

When the choice of the nominal anchor and timing of inflation stabilization is analyzed with models of political business cycles, there is room for political opportunism of policymakers. The different business cycles associated with exchange rate-based (ERBS) and money-based stabilizations (MBS)...

This study intends to provide an empirical answer to the question of whether Maastricht and SGP fiscal rules have affected growth of European Union countries. A growth equation augment with fiscal variables and controlling for the period in which fiscal rules were implemented in Europe is...

The Taylor rule establishes a simple linear relation between the interest rate, inflation and output gap. However, this relation may not be so simple. To get a deeper understanding of central banks' behaviour, this paper asks whether central banks are indeed following a linear Taylor rule or,...

Several studies have identified the factors that cause public deficits in industrial democracies. They consider that economic, political and institutional factors play an important role in the understanding of those deficits. However, the study of the determinants of excessive deficits remains...