The effects of different institutional arrangements for the central bank are examined in the presence of economic shocks and uncertainty about the central banker's and the medianvoter's inflation target. A contract which is based on self-imposed monetary target announcements proves to be...

In this paper we assess to what extent in the existence of a financial crisis, government spending can contribute to mitigate economic downturns in the short run and whether such impact differs in crisis and non crisis times. We use panel analysis for a set of OECD and non-OECD countries for the...