The paper investigates how European fiscal authorities behaved in the last decades. We argue that the cyclically-adjusted public budget (CAPB) is a too rough indicator of the fiscal stance as a function of the two objectives of output stabilization and debt decumulation. We construct two...

This paper contributes to the debate on fiscal governance for the European Monetary Union, assessing the different fiscal rules currently discussed. We simulate a small scale macroeconomic model with forward looking agents, augmented with a public finances block. We account for both the positive...

The European Central Bank publishes inflation projections quarterly. This paper aims at establishing whether they influence private forecasts and whether they may be considered as an enhanced means of implementing policy decisions by facilitating private agents’ information processing. We...

Policymakers at the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) publish forecasts since 1979. We examine the effects of publishing FOMC inflation forecasts in two steps using a structural VAR model. We assess whether they influence private inflation expectations and the underlying mechanism at work: do...

Focusing on a set of central banks that publish their internal macroeconomic forecasts in real time enables one to shed light on the expectations channel of monetary policy. The main contribution of this paper is to assess whether central bank forecasts influence private forecasts. The response...

Policymakers at the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) publish macroeconomic forecasts since 1979. Some studies find that these forecasts do not contain useful information to predict these macroeconomic variables compared to other forecasts. In this paper, we examine the value of publishing...

What are the effects of country size on growth and business cycle volatility? To investigate this question, previously asked by Rose (2006) and Furceri and Karras (2007), we developed an original country-size index with principal component analysis (PCA). Traditional analysis of this topic...

Since 1990, a growing number of countries have adopted inflation targeting (IT) around the world. Empirical evidence on its advantages has been mixed so far, and most assessments have been based on a control group methodology. In this paper, using a MSVAR technique, we assess the adoption of IT...

The literature on inflation targeting has up to now focused on its impact on macroeconomic performance or private expectations. In contrast, this paper proposes to investigate empirically whether the institutional adoption of this framework has changed the policy preferences of the central...

We study inflation targeting?s impact in Sweden over time and whether its adoption has constituted a regime switch using a msvar technique. We assess, based on two different specifications, the two main features generally attributed to it: the preference for inflation in the monetary reaction...