The paper takes stock of the debate on the positive link between output volatility and the size of government-which reflects automatic stabilizers. After a survey of the literature, we show that the contribution of automatic stabilizers to output stability may have disappeared since the 1990s....

The causes and consequences of the financial crises in the Nordic countries in the early 1990s are examined and lessons from this episode are extracted. The focus is on the boom-bust episode in Finland, Norway and Sweden as these three economies went into a deep recession. The lessons from the...