Since the mid-seventies fiscal policy in many OECD countries has been faced with the problem of rapidly rising public debt. The dynamics of public debt can be traced to two factors: first, the spread between the interest rate and the growth rate of the economy, and second, the primary budget...

A push-pull-brake model of capital flows is used to study the effects of fiscal policy changes on private capital flows to emerging Europe during 2000-07. In the model, countercyclical fiscal policy has two opposing effects on capital inflows: (i) a conventional absorptionreducing effect, as a...

We examine the robustness of persistence measurement to different seasonal adjustment procedures. The empirical analysis is based on U.S. data for real gross national product (GNP). Officially published data on U.S. GNP are seasonally adjusted by Census X-11. We find that this series gives...

The spread between long-term and short-term interest rates is an excellent leading indicator of business-cycle fluctuations in Austria and Germany. A negative spread signals a slowdown in future growth; a positive spread indicates improved growth prospects. This finding may serve to...

Boom and bust phases in asset prices have become a pervasive feature of macroeconomic developments in many advanced economies. This paper studies fiscal policy during boom-bust phases in asset prices and draws several conclusions. First, expansions and contractions in economic activity during...

Professional forecasts of aggregate U.S. consumption series strongly reject Robert E. Hall's (1978) random walk hypothesis. Band spectrum regressions show that low-frequency variations in growth ra tes of expenditures on nondurables and services, defined as cycles takin g more than two years to...