In Lisbon the European Council proclaimed a European growth strategy. It considers an average economic u0093growth rate of around 3 percent as a realistic prospect for the coming yearsu0094 and assigns public finances an important role in the process of achieving this goal. This paper addresses...

This paper examines the development of fiscal rules and budget procedures in EU countries, and their impact of public finances since the mid-1980s. It presents a new data set on institutional reforms and their impact in Europe. Empirical pattern confirm our prediction that more stringent fiscal...

This paper examines the feasibility of implementing Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) Control in structural cointegrated VAR models and sheds some light on the two major problems generated by such implementation. The first aspect to be taken into account is the effect of the presence of unit roots...

This paper attempts to characterise an anti-inflationary monetary targeting (MT) regime. In order to derive a formal representation of this regime, we formulate the central bank’s optimisation problem under the assumption that it is possible for the monetary targeted variable to have an impact...

Growth of wages, unemployment, employment and vacancies exhibit strong asymmetries between expansionary and contractionary phases. In this paper we analyze to what degree downward wage rigidities in the bargaining process affect other variables of the economy. We introduce asymmetric wage...