The paper first reviews the evolution of federal fiscal rules in the United States, showing a trend towards balanced-budget rules, not golden rules. An explanation to this trend is provided in a model that includes voter's preferences that are skewed by the history of the budget structure, and...

This article studies the impact of oil shocks on the macroeconomy in two ways insofar unexploited in the literature. The analysis is conducted at the global level, and it explicitly accounts for the potentially changing nature of oil shocks. Based on an original world GDP series and a grouping...

We estimate a SVAR model of the French economy. The econometric method originates in Blanchard and Perotti [Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2002] but owes also extensively to the fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL) that investigates the interactions between government surplus, debt...

This paper addresses the issue of whether and by how much public investment or public capital can enhance economic performance. In comparison with the literature on the subject, we apply many different methodologies to answer these questions. A VAR model (for France, Italy, Germany, the UK and...

This paper uses the SVAR methodology to investigate the effects of public investment on growth, and more specifically, the effects of the introduction of a golden rule of public finance. We extend the existing literature by estimating a model of the British economy that takes into account long...

Since 1990, a growing number of countries have adopted inflation targeting (IT) around the world. Empirical evidence on its advantages has been mixed so far, and most assessments have been based on a control group methodology. In this paper, using a MSVAR technique, we assess the adoption of IT...

We use a structural VAR model with short-term restrictions to investigate the relative importance of interest rate, exchange rate and credit channels in the monetary policy transmission (MPT) for the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland over 1993:1-2004:3. Main results are as follows. First, in...

The debate on public finances’ sustainability has long focused on the conditions for the accumulation of debt. This implied that, empirically, the analyses revolved around estimations of dynamic versions of the debt accumulation equation, through unit root tests and cointegration tests between...

This paper describes recent trends on the efficiency of stabilisers in the European Union. Using both macro evidence on the cyclical sensitivity of budget deficit to economic activity, and micro evidence on the tax and expenditure profiles, we conclude, in agreement with the recent literature,...

In this paper, we develop an analysis of the reasons for the apparent failure of the “Lisbon strategy” (2000) so far. After having made the general case for a comprehensive “institutionalist perspective” on the European economy, we first try to formalise the objectives of “Lisbon” in...