Search results for "Fiscal"
showing 10 items of 448 documents
When do cooperation and commitment matter in a monetary union?
2013
International audience; This paper offers a framework to study strategic interactions between private players, national fiscal authorities and a common central bank in monetary unions. We establish general conditions, in terms of restrictions on spillover effects of actions by private and public players, under which games that differ in the degree of cooperation and commitment can admit the same equilibrium outcome. We use these conditions to characterize benchmark results on the irrelevance of cooperation and commitment established in recent literature. Moreover, we show for a general setting, in which the benchmark results do not apply, that gains from fiscal cooperation depend on the num…
A quest between fiscal and market discipline
2023
Fiscal rules are typically seen as government constraints. Yet, the extent to which they are substituted or complemented by market discipline (especially, during financial stress) remains unexplored. Using data for 71 countries over the period 1985–2015, we estimate an “augmented” fiscal reaction function to assess the impact of both fiscal and market discipline. We find that different market signals influence fiscal policy, but fiscal discipline depends on market incentives. In the EU and the OECD, market signals complement fiscal rules. These are less effective in the EMU and non-OECD countries that are “debt intolerant”. Yet, there are unintended consequences: (i) neither output and debt…
Jacob Viner and the Chicago monetary tradition
2009
The paper aims at assessing Jacob Viner's role in that brand of monetary thought which historians associate with the Chicago School and whose origins can be retraced in the writings and teaching of Frank Knight, Lloyd Mints, Henry Simons and Viner himself. After a brief description of the prolonged debate over the origins and nature of the so called “Chicago Monetary Tradition”, we examine Viner's analyses and policy proposals drawing particular attention to: his analysis of the Great depression; his proposals for monetary expansion and banking reform; his shift of emphasis in favour of Fiscal Policy; the evolution of its monetary framework in the early 1930's. Finally, we compare his posit…
Regional inequalities, economic crises and policies: an international panel analysis
2021
This paper examines the effects of economic downturns on regional inequalities. In a sample of 25 OECD countries for 1990–2014 period, we show that economic downturns are associated with a significant and long-lasting reduction in regional inequalities. Expansionary fiscal policy as well as higher share of the European development (cohesion) funds facilitate the response of lagging regions to negative nation-wide shocks, contributing to further stimulate the reduction in regional disparities. Additional evidence suggests that the effect of downturns tends to be larger in economies with a higher initial level of regional disparities in unemployment and human capital endowment.
The effect of episodes of large capital inflows on domestic credit
2012
This paper analyses the effect of capital inflow surges on the evolution of domestic credit. Using a panel of developed and emerging economies from 1970 to 2007, it is shown that in the two years following the beginning of a capital inflow surge the credit-to-GDP ratio increases by about 2 percentage points. The effect is reversed in the medium-term with the credit-to-GDP ratio decreased by almost 4 percentage points seven years after the initial surge. The paper also finds that the effect is different depending on the type of flows characterising the episode (debt vs. portfolio equity vs. FDI), with large capital inflows that are debt-driven having the largest effect. The results of the pa…
Fiscal adjustments, labour market flexibility and unemployment
2014
Using a panel of 17 countries for 1978-2009, we find that tax-driven consolidations increase unemployment by 0.25 percentage points. Labour market flexibility mitigates this: a one-point rise in the flexibility index reduces youth (long-term) unemployment by 0.6-0.7 (1.8-2.2) percentage points.
How does fiscal consolidation impact on income inequality?
2012
In this paper, we assess the impact of fiscal consolidation on income inequality. Using a panel of 18 industrialized countries from 1978 to 2009, we find that income inequality significantly rises during periods of fiscal consolidation. In addition, while fiscal policy that is driven by spending cuts seems to be detrimental for income distribution, tax hikes seem to have an equalizing effect. We also show that the size of the fiscal consolidation program (in percentage of GDP) has an impact on income inequality. In particular, when consolidation plans represent a small share of GDP, the income gap widens, suggesting that the burden associated with the effort affects disproportionately house…
Heterogeneous gains from countercyclical fiscal policy: new evidence from international industry-level data
2021
Abstract Empirical evidence to date suggests a positive relationship between fiscal policy countercyclicality and growth. But do all industries gain equally from countercyclical fiscal policy? What are the channels through which countercyclical fiscal policy affects industry-level growth? We answer these questions by applying a difference-in-difference approach to an unbalanced panel of 22 manufacturing industries for 55 countries—including both advanced and developing economies—during the period 1970–2014. Among the various industry characteristics guided by different theoretical channels, we find that the credit constraints channel identifies the best transmission mechanism through which …
The effects of recent Spanish pension reforms on sustainability and pension adequacy
2017
ABSTRACTThe Spanish pension system has been recently reformed as a response to the demographic challenge and with the objective of ensuring the sustainability of the pension system in the long-term. The overall reforms include changes in the majority of the system parameters, a new indexation rule and a sustainability factor that links life expectancy and the first pension amount. The aim of this work is to analyse how these reforms affect two important features of a pension system: fiscal sustainability and adequacy. For this purpose, the real internal rate of return (IRR) of the lifetime contributions and benefits and the prospective gross theoretical replacement rate (TRR), both before a…
Fiscal visibility in the european union member countries: New estimates
1998
Improvements in the efficient allocation of resources can be reached by increasing public revenue and expenditure visibility. This paper presents some indicators permitting the making of time and space fiscal visibility measurements and comparisons and advances new systematic estimates on fiscal visibility for systems and subsystems of public revenue now in force in the European Union member countries. Policy implications seem straightforward for these countries as present revenue visibility values are low in general. Allocation improvements could be obtained by implementing changes and reforms aiming to raise values of public revenue visibility and to make domestic fiscal systems and subsy…