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How do cyclical fiscal stabilisation policies affect welfare and government bond risk premia? Using a new Keynesian model we find that the effects of fiscal policy rules on the bond premium and welfare crucially depend on the source of business cycle fluctuations. The overall effect is estimated using Bayesian methods and the mechanism is deconstructed by examining the propagation mechanism of the different shocks. We find that the impact of fiscal policy cyclicality on welfare and risk premia is highly non-linear and that these effects are of a policy relevant magnitude. Finally, we find that the welfare cost of highly procyclical fiscal policies are very large, but also excessive fiscal stabilization can generate non- negligible welfare losses.

We introduce a specification of habit formation featuring non-separability between consumption and leisure into an otherwise standard New Keynesian model. The model can be estimated with standard Bayesian techniques and the bond pricing implications are evaluated using higher-order approximations. The model is able to reproduce a sizeable risk premium on long-term bonds and the cyclicality of fiscal policy has an impact on the bond premium that is quantitatively important. Technology, government spending, and mark-up shocks are the main drivers of the time-variation in bond premia.

This paper analyzes the relationship between unemployment, average effective labour tax rates & public spending in 17 OECD countries. The focus is on the degree of centralization & cooperation in wage setting. Estimation results from a dynamic time-series-cross-section model suggest that the countries where wage setting takes place at the firm level have used labour taxes less extensively in financing welfare spending, compared to countries with centralized or decentralized bargaining. This is consistent with another finding, according to which labour taxes distort the labour demand the least in the countries with firm level bargaining. 2 Appendixes, 24 References. [Copyright 2004 Elsevier B.V.]

In March 2013 around 130 participants from academia, banking and finance, governments and central banking gathered at the premises of the OeNB in Vienna for a conference jointly organized by the European Money and Finance Forum SUERF, the OeNB and the Austrian Society for Bank Research to discuss "The Future of Sovereign Borrowing." The financial, economic and sovereign debt crisis has fundamentally changed the rules of the game in sovereign debt markets, particularly in the euro area, but also beyond its borders. Sovereign bonds are no longer widely perceived as 'risk-free' assets. Even the sovereign bonds of safe-haven countries have come under close scrutiny or lost some of their prime ratings. Yet crisis countries have seen dramatic downgrades of their sovereign debt ratings so that they face soaring risk spreads and unsustainably high financing costs (or even a loss of access to bond market financing), pushing them towards shorter financing or forcing them to rely on financial support from other countries and the international community or massive intervention by central banks.