What are the effects of a higher central bank inflation target on the burden of real public debt? Several recent proposals have suggested that even a moderate increase in the inflation target can have a pronounced effect on real public debt. We consider this question in a New Keynesian model...

The empirical and theoretical literature on long-term relationships in public finance is dominated by two approaches: Fiscal sustainability and Wagner's law of an increasing state activity. In this paper, we argue that these two relationships should be analyzed simultaneously and not separately....

This paper presents a new approach for analysing the recent development of EMU sovereign bond spreads. Based on a GARCH-in-mean model originally used in the exchange rate target zone literature, spreads are decomposed into a risk premium, an expected loss component and a liquidity premium....

This paper examines the results of 93 discriminatory German Treasury auctions between 1998 and 2002. It documents the seller's use of discretion and its influence on auction outcomes and bidding strategies. The evidence suggests that the seller uses its discretion frequently and substantially....

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 creative accounting...

In a dynamic model of fiscal policy, social polarization provokes a deficit bias. Policy advisors have recently proposed that governments running a deficit should be forced to generate additional tax revenue. We show that this deficit taxation reduces the deficit bias as it internalizes the...

The paper presents a comprehensive data set of all bonds issued by the sixteen German states (L¨ander) since 1992. It thus provides a complete picture of a capital market comparable in size to funds raised in the German fixed income market for corporations. The quantitative analysis reveals...

We investigate output sensitivity of inflation in the euro area through a disaggregated analysis using price indices at the COICOP 4-digit level and compare cyclical sensitivity of a newly created index of cyclically sensitive items (ICSP) with that of headline HICP and core price indices. We...

Multiple structural change tests by Bei and Perron (1998) are applied to the regression by Demetrescu, Kuzin and Hassler (2008) in order to detect breaks in the order of fractional integration. With this instrument we tackle time-varying inflation persistence as an important issue for monetary...

The paper estimates the NAIRU from a Phillips curve relationship in the state-space framework. To identify the inflation-unemployment trade-off we account for a time-varying inflation trend to control for the part of inflation that is not affected by the cyclical component of unemployment. In...