The paper attempts to assess to what extent the central bank or the government should respond to developments that can cause financial instability, such as housing or asset bubbles, overextended budgetary policies, or excessive public and household debt. To analyse this question we set up a...

The paper attempts to assess to what extent the central bank or the government should respond to developments that can cause financial instability, such as housing or asset bubbles, overextended budgetary policies, or excessive public and household debt. To analyse this question we set up a...

Should independent monetary and fiscal policies coordinate their actions and/or targets? To examine this question the paper considers a simple reduced-form model in which monetary and fiscal policies are formally independent, but still interdependent—through their mutual spillovers. The...

This paper does two things. First it examines the use of real time inter-annual cash data and the role of early interventions for improving the monitoring of national fiscal policies and the correction of fiscal indiscipline. Early warnings are important because they allow us to spread the...

This paper highlights the importance of debt-related fiscal rules and derives growth-maximising public debt ratios from a simple theoretical model. On the basis of evidence on the productivity of public capital, we estimate public debt targets that governments should try to maintain if they wish...

In a recent paper in this journal [Demertzis, M., Hughes Hallett, A., Viegi, N., 2004. An independent Central Bank faced with elected governments: European Journal of Political Economy 20, 907-922.] we showed that, when voting is endogenised, an independent and conservative Central Bank will...

The use of real-time cash data allows us to make accurate intra-annual forecasts of an economy’s fiscal position, and to issue early warning signals for the need to correct fiscal imbalances. This paper shows how those signals can be used to design the necessary fiscal corrections, and...

In this paper we examine the effects of private agents being less than fully rational. We examine this in the context of monetary policy, where the Central Bank may have uncertain preferences either by choice or by necessity. The new feature is that we allow the public to react in two different...