We re-examin the notion of identifying macroeconomic effects using the narrative approach taking as an application the estimation of tax multipliers. We point out to a test for the checking the adequacy of regressing the narrative measure directly on the outcome variable. This test...

Mid-long term projections of the Stability Programs (SP) are elaborated to simulate the burden each active citizen or each worker will have to bear for financing, via pay-as-you-go, public health care provisions and public pensions. It is worth mentioning that projections in the (SP) are those...

This paper investigates the determinants of fiscal policy behavior and its time-varying volatility, using panel data for a broad set of advanced and emerging market economies during the period 1990–2012. The empirical results show that discretionary fiscal policy is influenced by policy...

In a quantitative model of Social Security with endogenous health, I argue that Social Security increases the aggregate health spending of the economy because it redistributes resources to the elderly whose marginal propensity to spend on health is high. I show by using computational experiments...

This paper studies a model of equilibrium unemployment in which the ecacy of scal policy increases markedly in times of crises. A sudden rise in pessimism leads households to save rather than to spend, causing a fall in output and rising unemployment But as a persistent rise in unemployment...

In this paper we propose a new methodology to improve the estimation of structural budget balances in Slovakia. Major innovations compared to currently used methods are in using more robust output gap estimates, inclusion of pensions in the analysis, imposing consistency between various gap...

The basic answer to the question posed by the title is: yes. We follow Ewing et al. (2006) and examine the US federal revenue-expenditure nexus in an error-correction model allowing for asymmetric adjustment. Symmetric adjustment is rejected by data from the 1959.3 to 2007.4 period. However, as...

In a quantitative model of Social Security with endogenous health, I argue that Social Security increases the aggregate health spending of the economy because it redistributes resources to the elderly whose marginal propensity to spend on health is high. I show by using computational experiments...

I discuss the joint effects of government-taxes and interest-rates. A fiscal authority performs `exogenous' and `endogenous' changes to the income-tax rate and a monetary authority sets the nominal-interest. A wedge between rates of self-financing of tax cuts and the income-tax Laffer curve...

Economic research shows that candidates have a higher chance of getting (re-)elected when they have the luck that the world economy does well even though this is beyond their control and unrelated to their competence. Psychological research demonstrates that candidates increase their chances if...