This paper studies the sustainability of fiscal policy for selected Euro-area countries. We focus on those countries that either have a high debt to GDP ratio (Italy) or have recently violated the Maastricht treaty by permitting more than three percent of the deficit to GDP ratio (France,...

The paper reconsiders an influential model by Blanchard (1981) that extends the textbook ISLM framework by including among the financial assets, besides money and short-term bonds, also long-term bonds and equities. Aggregate demand is supposed to vary with Tobin's (average) q, rather than the...

We analyze the role of social environment and human capital formation in persistence of poverty and inequality. We present a Romer type variety model where the presence of economies of agglomeration in social environment may cause two basins of attraction; whereby we may interpret the lower...

In this paper we extend an integrated closed-economy macrodynamic model to account for a large open economy in a currency area with fixed nominal exchange rates between the currencies. The major issues are the effectiveness and macrodynamic effects of monetary policy for countries in a pegged or...

The problem of monetary and fiscal policy interactions is an important issue for the euro area, since the individual member states of the EMU are responsible for their fiscal policies but monetary policy is pursued by a single monetary authority, the ECB. This paper is concerned with empirical...

The accuracy of the solution of dynamic general equilibrium models has become a major issue. Recent papers, in which second-order approximations have been substituted for first-order, indicate that this change may yield a significant improvement in accuracy. Second order approximations have been...