Search results for "Government"
showing 10 items of 1098 documents
Fiscal sustainability in the EU: From the short-term risk to the long-term challenge
2015
Abstract The paper analyses fiscal sustainability of public debt using a dynamic computable general equilibrium model. First, we identify the short-term risk for fiscal stress at country level; second, we investigate the assumption of convergence towards the government debt threshold (medium-term challenge); and, third, the requirement that debt projections do not show unsustainable trends (long-term challenge). The empirical implementation includes 18 EU Member States. Our findings show that the constant tax rate that stabilizes the public debt converges to 50 percentage of GDP for all the sample countries and tax revenues are the main driving forces for fiscal sustainability. Also our fin…
Fiscal Convergence, Business Cycle Volatility and Growth
2009
This paper analyzes the effects of fiscal convergence on business cycle volatility and growth. Using a panel 21 OECD countries (including 11 EMU countries) and 40 years of data, we find that countries with similar government budget positions tend to have smoother business cycles. That is, fiscal convergence (in the form of persistently similar ratios of government surplus/deficit to GDP) is systematically associated with smoother business cycles. We also find evidence that reduced business cycle volatility through higher fiscal convergence stimulates growth. Our empirical results are economically and statistically significant and robust.
Nonlinear effects of asset prices on fiscal policy: Evidence from the UK, Italy and Spain
2015
"Available online 1 August 2014"
Exploring Countercyclical Fiscal Policy in Local Government: Moving Beyond an Aggregated Approach
2014
There is a renewed interest in the fiscal health of local governments in the United States, which is being driven in part by academic research, professional organizations, and the economy. This renewed interest also includes how local governments use their cash reserves for countercyclical fiscal policy, which is a stream of research that has received minimal attention in the literature. We respond in this article by exploring how 97 North Carolina counties used their cash reserves from 2005 to 2012, which includes the great recession of 2008 and 2009. Our findings provide some evidence of countercyclical fiscal policy in local government when exploring the use of cash reserves from an aggr…
Can fiscal decentralization alleviate government consumption volatility?
2016
We analyse how fiscal decentralization affects the volatility of government consumption extending the existing literature that mainly deals with the effects of the former on government size. Using data for 97 developed and developing countries from 1971 to 2010, we find that a higher degree of fiscal decentralization leads to lower government consumption volatility. This result holds for the sub-sample of advanced economies, while it is not confirmed for those less-developed. This mechanism seems to work mainly through a lower volatility of the non-discretionary spending, which typically belongs to the central government’s policy. We also confirm existing findings according to which country…
Biking to School: The Role of Bicycle-Sharing Programs in Adolescents
2016
BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to: (1) describe modes of transport to school, with a specific focus on the use of public bicycle share programs (PBSP); and (2) assess sociodemographic, psychosocial, and environmental correlates of bike and PBSP use to go to school. METHODS A group of 465 adolescents from the International Physical Activity and the Environment Network (IPEN) Adolescent Study (Valencia, Spain) participated in the research. Mixed regression analyses were conducted on the data obtained. RESULTS Not having bicycle access, a PBSP card, or a public bike lane close to the school is negatively associated with bicycle use. PBSP is positively associated with physical self-ef…
Research in China
2009
My stay in China began in November 1985 with a lecture at the opening of the Max Planck Guest Laboratory in the Institute of Cell Biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Shanghai (Hennig, 2000). It marked the beginning of 23 years of research and teaching at the Institute of Cell Biology and other universities throughout China. > Looking back after 23 years, the changes that have taken place in China could not have been predicted in 1985… In January 2001, I accepted a long‐term lectureship offered by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD; Bonn, Germany), which, with further support from CAS, allowed me to create my own research group within the Shanghai Institutes for Biolo…
Single-Target Implicit Association Tests (ST-IAT) Predict Voting Behavior of Decided and Undecided Voters in Swiss Referendums
2016
Undecided voters represent a major challenge to political pollsters. Recently, political psychologists have proposed the use of implicit association tests (IAT) to measure implicit attitudes toward political parties and candidates and predict voting behavior of undecided voters. A number of studies have shown that both implicit and explicit (i.e., self-reported) attitudes contribute to the prediction of voting behavior. More importantly, recent research suggests that implicit attitudes may be more useful for predicting the vote of undecided voters in the case of specific political issues rather than elections. Due to its direct-democratic political system, Switzerland represents an ideal pl…
Effects of total dietary polyphenols on plasma nitric oxide and blood pressure in a high cardiovascular risk cohort. The PREDIMED randomized trial
2014
© 2014 Elsevier B.V. Background and aim: Hypertension is one of the main cardiovascular risk factors in the elderly. The aims of this work were to evaluate if a one-year intervention with two Mediterranean diets (Med-diet) could decrease blood pressure (BP) due to a high polyphenol consumption, and if the decrease in BP was mediated by plasma nitric oxide (NO) production. Methods and results: An intervention substudy of 200 participants at high cardiovascular risk was carried out within the PREDIMED trial. They were randomly assigned to a low-fat control diet or to two Med-diets, one supplemented with extra virgin olive oil (Med-EVOO) and the other with nuts (Med-nuts). Anthropometrics and …
Users of home-care services in a Nordic welfare state under marketisation: the rich, the poor and the sick
2017
Stricter access to public services, outsourcing of municipal services and increasing allocation of public funding for the purchase of private services have resulted in a marketisation wave in Finland. In this context of a Nordic welfare state undergoing marketisation, this paper aims to examine the use of Finnish care services among older people and find out who are using these new kinds of private services. How wide is their use and do the users of private care services differ from those who are using public services? How usual is it to mix both public and private care services? The questionnaire survey data set used here was gathered in 2010 among the population aged 75 and over in the ci…