Using panel data of 17 OECD countries for 1980-2011, we find that the distributional consequences of fiscal consolidations depend significantly on the level of private indebtedness. Austerity leads to a strong and persistent increase in income inequality during periods of private debt overhang....

On the one hand, every official document about fiscal policy in Spain, and most orthodox academic papers argue that Spain has no "fiscal space" and that it should apply resolute actions to assure budget consolidation. On the other hand, Spain also had the second highest unemployment rate in the...

We document substantial heterogeneity in occupational employment dynamics in response to government spending shocks. Employment rises most strongly in service, sales, and office ("pink-collar") occupations. By contrast, employment in blue-collar occupations is hardly affected by fiscal stimulus...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of public expenditures on economic growth within the analytical framework of comprehensive Neo-Schumpeterian economics. Using a fixed-effects model for G20 countries, the paper investigates the links between the specific categories of public expenditures and...

On the one hand, every official document about fiscal policy in Spain, and most orthodox academic papers argue that Spain has no "fiscal space" and that it should apply resolute actions to assure budget consolidation. On the other hand, Spain also had the second highest unemployment rate in the...

Historically, Chile has been an economy dominated by mineral and agro-industrial products and subject to frequent external shocks particularly in copper prices. Since the 1980s, the authorities have developed various mechanisms to cope with these shocks and dampen their effects on the domestic...

We extend the canonical model of search and matching frictions by including capital-skill complementarity in production, labour markets with skilled and unskilled workers and on-the-job-learning (OJL) within and across skill types. These extensions capture key characteristics of skilled and...

The paper analyses the common European monetary policy based on a Mises-Hayek overinvestment framework, which is combined with the theory of optimum currency areas. It shows how since the turn of the millennium a too expansionary monetary policy contributed to unsustainable overinvestment booms...

In this paper we estimate the effect of government consumption shocks on GDP using a panel of 21 developing economies. Our goal is to better understand the reasons for the low fiscal multipliers found in the literature by performing estimations for alternative exchange rate regimes,...

We investigate cross-country fiscal policy spillovers through the integration of capital markets in a currency union and allow capital use in production to differ across countries. Following empirical evidence, we assume that production exhibits capital-skill complementarity. Using a...

Commodity prices are an important driver of fiscal policy and the business cycle in many developing economies. We analyze a dynamic stochastic small-open-economy model of sovereign default, featuring endogenous fiscal policy and stochastic commodity revenues. The model accounts for a positive...

The euro area sovereign debt crisis has highlighted the importance of reducing public debt levels and building up sufficient fiscal buffers during normal and good times. It has also reaffirmed the need for a thorough debt sustainability analysis (DSA) to act as a warning system for national...

This paper analyzes Germany's unusual labor market experience during the Great Recession. We estimate a general equilibrium model with a detailed labor market block for post-unification Germany. This allows us to disentangle the role of institutions (short-time work, government spending rules)...

Investment growth in emerging market and developing economies has slowed sharply since 2010. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the causes and implications of this slowdown and presents a menu of policy responses to improve investment growth. It reports four main results. First, the...

We study the general equilibrium implications of different fiscal policies on macroeconomic quantities, asset prices, and welfare by utilizing two endogenous growth models. The expanding variety model features only homogeneous innovations by entrants. The Schumpeterian growth model features...

In this paper we introduce reciprocity in labor relations and government sector to investigate how well the real wage rigidity that results out of that arrangement explains business cycle fluctuations in Bulgaria. The reciprocity mechanism described in this paper follows Danthine and Kurmann...

This study empirically investigates the short- to medium-term effects of fiscal policy on output and other macroeconomic variables in European Union countries between 1995 and 2012, with particular reference to transition countries. It applies Panel Vector Auto Regression with recursive...

We provide evidence of the relative cost-effectiveness of different types of policy instrument in reducing poverty or limiting its increase, comparing within and between seven diverse EU countries. We do that by measuring the implications of increasing/reducing the instrument size within its...

Short-time work is a labor market policy that subsidizes working time reductions among firms in financial difficulty in order to prevent layoffs and stabilize employment. Many OECD countries have used this policy in the Great Recession, for example. This paper shows that the effects of...

The paper analyses the role of monetary policy for cyclical movements of investment and asset markets in East Asia and Europe based on a Mises-Hayek overinvestment framework. It is shown how the gradual global decline of interest rates has triggered wandering overinvestment cycles in Japan,...

In this paper we estimate the effect of government consumption shocks on GDP using a panel of 21 developing economies. Our goal is to better understand the reasons for the low fiscal multipliers found in the literature by performing estimations for alternative exchange rate regimes,...

What are the effects of changes in taxation and new types of mortgages on the real economy? - The case of Denmark during the 00's What are the effects of introducing interest-only, flexible-rate mortgage contracts and a tax-freeze on housing wealth for the real- and financial economy? I study...

The paper shows that international government borrowing from multilateral development banks is countercyclical while international government borrowing form private sector lenders is procyclical. The countercyclicality of official lending is mostly driven by the behavior of the World Bank...

Using the augmented version of the Blanchard-Perotti's SVAR technique, this paper seeks to empirically estimate the size of fiscal multipliers in Turkey over the period 2002:q3-2016:q2. In contrast to many previous papers that concentrate on fiscal policy instruments -taxes and government...

In this paper, we analyze the consequences of delays and cost overruns typically associated with the provision of public infrastructure in the context of a growing economy. Our results indicate that uncertainty about the arrival of public capital can more than offset its positive spillovers for...

Due to input-output linkages, an industry level shock can widely transmit to the rest of the economy. We identify government policies on the automobile industry, which change final prices and estimate their effect on sales and production. An example could be the scrappage schemes that many...

Budget-neutral tax wedge reductions rank high in the policy agenda of several EMU member states. Using a New Keynesian DSGE model of a monetary union with a complex labour market structure and a comprehensive public sector, we evaluate the macroeconomic and welfare effects of reducing the firms'...

This paper makes three main points. Fiscal policy, first, may be needed in the long run to maintain full employment and avoid secular stagnation. If fiscal policy is used in this way, second, the long-run debt ratio depends (i) inversely on the rate of growth, (ii) inversely on government...

We estimate a highly significant price of risk that forecasts global stock and bond returns as a nonlinear function of the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX). We show that countries' exposure to the global price of risk is related to macroeconomic risks as measured by output, credit, and inflation...

This paper investigates the effects of government spending on key macroeconomic variables in Germany. It contributes to the ongoing debate on how to properly identify exogenous fiscal shocks in the data and on whether or not the government should intervene in the business cycle. Following Ramey...

The integration of technology in the educational process is becoming increasingly important for improving the 21st century student's understanding and retention of academic material. Being able to readily apply the theory covered in class and to automatically receive immediate feedback is...

This study sets out to examine the nexus between fiscal policy and private investment in five selected West African countries using annual data from 1993 to 2014. Employing Fixed Effect Model for Panel data ordinary least square approach, the results showed the existence of a significant...

This paper analyzes the impact of external price shocks on fiscal policy in Argentina during the last two decades. The paper evaluates, through VAR models with long-term restrictions, the effects of the terms of trade, and the output gap, in revenues, expenditures and the primary fiscal deficit,...

We use a welfare-based intertemporal stochastic optimization model and historical data to estimate the size of the optimal intergenerational and liquidity funds and the corresponding resource dividend available to the government of the Canadian province Alberta. To first-order of approximation,...

The integration of technology in the educational process is becoming increasingly important for improving the 21st century student's understanding and retention of academic material. Being able to readily apply the theory covered in class and to automatically receive immediate feedback is...

This paper explores the effects of fiscal policy in an economy based on indirect taxes, and taxing all income at the same rate. The focus of the paper is on the relative importance of consumption vs. income taxation, as well as on the provision of valuable public services. To this end, a...

Proxy structural vector autoregressions (SVARs)identify structural shocks in vector autoregressions (VARs) with external proxy variables that are correlated with the structural shocks of interest but uncorrelated with other structural shocks. We provide asymptotic theory for proxy SVARs when the...

In the European Union, the creation of public debt statistics starts with member state governments' reports. The EU's statistical agency-Eurostat-then revises. How do these actors' incentives shape reported numbers? Governments have incentives to take a more favourable view of often ambiguous...

Recent work on the relationship between tax structure and economic growth has offered little reliable evidence for developing countries. Yet it is in such countries where the greatest changes in tax structure not only have been seen over the past 30 years but will likely continue to be seen in...

This paper shows that the fiscal multiplier for purchases of durable and investment goods is very small - much smaller than the multiplier for nondurable goods. Standard models predict small durables multipliers because private sector purchases of durable goods are highly intertemporally...

In this paper we investigate the quantitative importance of search and matching fric- tions in Bulgarian labor markets. This is done by augmenting an otherwise standard real business cycle model a la Long and Plosser (1983) with both a two-sided costly search and fiscal policy. This introduces a...

The importance of liquidity and insolvency for nation states and banks has been highlighted by current economic woes in the eurozone and elsewhere. The concepts are grounded in monetary theory, which determine the way they are interpreted. Connected to the discussion of autometallism and...

This paper empirically studies whether it pays off (in terms of economic growth) to fulfill the convergence criteria on the public budget and participation in the Euro-zone. The analysis is based on data of European economies with a special focus on twelve Euro-zone members and a control group...

The paper focuses on public finance and the aspect of fiscal consolidation in Poland as economic consequences after the financial crisis in 2008. The study assumes that there is a wide range of needs for fiscal consolidation implementation in European post-crisis countries. Budgets of the vast...

This paper provides a critical analysis of expansionary austerity theory (EAT). The focus is on the theoretical weaknesses of EAT-the extreme circumstances and fragile assumptions under which expansionary consolidations might actually take place. The paper presents a simple theoretical model...