Fiscal stance may respond pro-cyclically to the business cycle... This chapter describes the extent to which fiscal policy has been a stabilising or destabilising influence on economic activity in the OECD area over the last two decades, and investigates some of the institutional factors which may have led to the observed outcome. The concerns motivating the chapter relate to the fact that disc...

In the absence of government commitment, the conduct of fiscal and monetary policy depends on the sign of inherited net nominal government obligations. When these obligations are negative, monetary policy is non-distortionary and fiscal policy distortions are smoothed over time, either forever or for a finite number of periods, depending on the initial state. For positive net nominal government...

The Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) implies a considerable change in monetary and fiscal policy design in the European Union. With the aid of a two-country version of the Alesina and Tabellini (1987) model, this paper provides a stylized analysis of monetary and fiscal policy interaction in the EMU. It is shown how macroeconomic outcomes are affected by common monetary and fiscal policies, an...

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, with periphery countries in the European Union even more falling behind the core countries economically, there have been quests for various kind of fiscal policies in order to revert divergence. How these policies would unfold and perform comparatively is largely unknown. We analyze four such stylized policies in an agent-based macroeconomic model and s...