Fiscal rules, such as the Excessive Deficit Procedure and the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), aim at constraining government behavior. Milesi-Ferretti (2003) develops a model in which governments circumvent such rules by reverting to creative accounting. The amount of this depends on the...

This paper uses a new data set on budgetary institutions in Europe to examine the impact of fiscal rules and budget procedures in EU countries on public finances. It briefly describes the main pattern of budgetary institutions and their determinants across the EU 15 member states. Empirical...

This paper studies budget processes, both theoretically and experimentally. We compare the outcomes of bottom-up and top-down budget processes. It is often presumed that a top-down budget process leads to a smaller overall budget than a bottom-up budget process. Ferejohn and Krehbiel (1987)...

This paper provides a study of bond yield differentials among EU government bonds issued between 1993 and 2005 on the basis of a unique dataset of issue spreads in the US and DM (Euro) bond market. Interest differentials between bonds issued by EU countries and Germany or the USA contain risk...

Latin America's economies have made tremendous improvements in recent years. Following the lost decade of the 1980s, economic growth has resumed. But the fruits of this progress remain to be consolidated. The political consensus supporting reform is fragile, and the economies of the region are...

Financial innovation increases markets' liquidity and provides economic agents with new instruments to better handle risks, but it reduces the efficacy of monetary policy while strengthening the logic and force of the “unholy trinityâ€. Increased liquidity of financial markets and...

This paper studies the Deutsche Bundesbank's concept of monetary targeting and discusses its merits relative to the Anglo-Saxon concept of direct inflation targeting. It is shown that monetary targeting is an effective device for anchoring medium-term inflation expectations. At the same time,...

We analyze the choice of exchange rate regimes of the 25 transition economies in Europe and the CIS after 1990. The empirical results show that the traditional Optimum Currency Area considerations provide relevant guidance for the regime choices in these countries. Moreover, regime choices are...

We use futures instead of forward rates to study the complete maturity spectrum of the forward premium puzzle from two days to six months. At short maturities the slope coefficient is positive, but these turn negative as the maturity increases to the monthly level. Futures data allow us to...