Efectos macroeconómicos de shocks fiscales en la UE

Abstract

The main objective of this doctoral thesis is to advance the understanding of the interactions between fiscal policies in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and to study the effects of fiscal policy coordination on key macroeconomic variables of the Member States of the European Union (EU). Specifically, in this thesis, we analyze the macroeconomic effects produced by different fiscal policies in the EU countries, both from theoretical and empirical points of view. In the theoretical part of the thesis, first we survey the contributions of various economic theories on the effects of discretionary fiscal policies, and second we overview some relevant papers that employ vector autoregressive (VAR) models to analyze the consequences of various shocks to fiscal variables in the EU economies. From an empirical point of view, we estimate VAR models that include public expenditure and public receipts variables, as well as key macroeconomic variables such as real GDP, inflation and interest rates. From the estimated models, we calculate the corresponding impulse response functions to study the dynamic effects of several fiscal policy options in the investigated economies.