When policymakers have little option but to consider a sizable fiscal adjustment, they are confronted by the following questions: Can a large fiscal adjustment be implemented succesfully? How is a large adjustment best designed and implemented? What will be its impact on the economy? This...

Fiscal consolidation has become a central policy prescription for many highly indebted emerging market countries (EMCs). Although prudent fiscal policies tend to reduce vulnerabilities, their implementation is usually postponed. This paper is one of the first attempts in the literature to...

The paper reviews the impact of the recent global financial crisis for fiscal policy. As signs of economic recovery emerge and consolidate at the global level and countries prepare plans to exit from the exceptional fiscal stimulus, the paper reviews the cost of the crisis for public finances...

This paper introduces the first truly comprehensive database on gross government-debt-to-GDP ratios, covering nearly the entire IMF membership (178 countries) and spanning an exceptionally long time period (going back to 1880 for most advanced and some emerging economies). The paper then uses...

The purpose of this paper is to extend previous research by investigating the allocation of space (number of printed pages) by editors and co-editors of economics journals. We present evidence indicating that the average article length may be affected by the author's previously established and...

Recent research has found that the time path of revenue and expenditure equations fails to respond to budgetary disequilibria but does adjust toward their long-run relationship to the gross national product. This result has been used to reject both the tax-and-spend and spend-and-tax models of...

Assessing the magnitude of the output gap is critical to achieving an optimal policy mix. Unfortunately, the gap is an unobservable variable, which, in practice, has been estimated in a variety of ways, depending on the preferences of the modeler. This model selection problem leads to a...