The financial crisis of 2007/8 has triggered a profound debate about public budget finance sustainability, ever-increasing government expenditures and the efficiency of fiscal policy measures. Given this context, the following dissertation provides four contributions that analyze the long-run growth of government spending throughout economic development, discuss potential effects of fiscal policy measures on output, and provide new insights into the assessment of debt sustainability for a variety of industrialized countries. Since the breakout of the European debt crisis in 2009/2010, there has been a revival of interest in the long-term growth of government expenditures. In this context, the relationship between the size of the public sector and economic growth - often referred to as Wagner's law - has been in the focus of numerous studies, especially with regard to public policy and fiscal sustainability. Using historical data from the mid-19th century, the first chapter analyzes the validity of Wagner's law for five industrialized European countries and links the discussion to different stages of economic development. In line with Wagner's hypothesis, our findings show that the relationship between public spending and economic growth has weakened at an advanced stage of development. Furthermore, all countries under review support the notion that Wagner's law may have lost its economic relevance in recent decades. As a consequence of the 2007/8 financial crisis, there has been an increasing theoretical and empirical debate about the impact of fiscal policy measures on output. Accordingly, the Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) approach to estimating the fiscal multipliers developed by Blanchard and Perotti (2002) has been applied widely in the literature in recent years. In the second chapter, we point out that the fiscal multipliers derived from this approach include the predicted future path of the policy instruments as well as their dynamic interaction. We analyze a data set from the US and document that these interactions are economically and statistically significant. In a counterfactual simulation, we report fiscal multipliers that abstract from these dynamic responses. Furthermore, we use our estimates to analyze the recent fiscal stimulus of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The third chapter contributes to the existing empirical literature on fiscal multipliers by applying a five-variable SVAR approach to a uniform data set for Belgium, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Besides studying the effects of expenditure and tax increases on output, we additionally analyze their dynamic effects on inflation and interest rates as well as the dynamic interaction of both policy instruments. By conducting counterfactual simulations, which abstract from the dynamic response of key macroeconomic variables to the initial fiscal shocks, we study the importance of these channels for the transmission of fiscal policy on output. Overall, the results demonstrate that the effects of fiscal shocks are limited and rather different across countries. Further, it is shown that the inflation and interest rate channel are insignificant for the transmission of fiscal policy. In the field of public finances, governmental budgetary policies are among the most controversial and disputed areas of political and scientific controversy. The sustainability of public debt is often analyzed by testing stationarity conditions of government's budget deficits. The fourth chapter shows that this test can be implemented more effectively by means of an asymmetric unit root test. We argue that this approach increases the power of the test and reduces the likelihood of drawing false inferences. We illustrate this in an application to 14 countries of the European Monetary Union as well as in a Monte Carlo simulation. Distinguishing between positive and negative changes in deficits, we find consistency with the intertemporal budget constraint for more countries, i.e. lower persistence of positive changes in some countries, compared to the earlier literature.

Pour le superviseur, une approche historique de la banque permet de mieux assimiler ses modes de fonctionnement. Elle sert aussi à mieux comprendre pourquoi ses acteurs, toujours dotés, à raison, de la confiance indispensable au développement des affaires, font preuve parfois d’un sur-optimisme conduisant à leur ruine. La mobilisation du droit : telle est ce qui guide l’action du contrôleur de banque. La dernière crise financière a provoqué une prise de conscience en Europe : l’impossibilité pour chaque pays membre de l’Union d’exercer individuellement une surveillance efficace sans une harmonisation totale. Ainsi est née l’idée puis la construction du MSU. Centralisée à Francfort, la supervision unique est en place depuis le 4 novembre 2014. Mais sa feuille de route porte sur un champ plus diversifiable encore. Par construction, le MSU possède les qualités d’efficacité et de pérennité requises. Mais aura-t-il la volonté de contribuer à la transformation de toute l’Union européenne en zone de supervision optimale ? / For the supervisor, an historical approach of banks allows to better assimilate its ways of functioning. She also serves to better understand why her actors, always endowed of the confidence to develop business, sometimes, show an over-optimism leading to their ruin. The mobilization of the law guides the action of the banking control. The 2007-2008 crisis has provoked awareness in Europe: the impossibility for every member state of the Union to exercise individually an effective supervision without a total harmonization. So was born the construction of the MSU. Located in Frankfurt, the “supervision unique” has been working since November 4th, 2014. But the road map assigned to the supervision a new and more diversifiable field. For sure, the MSU is skilled enough, but is there a will to change the European Union into a “zone de supervision optimale”?

This thesis examines the measurement, applications and properties of consumer inflation expectations in the context of eight European Union countries: France, Germany, the UK, Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden. The data proceed mainly from the European Commission's Consumer Survey and are qualitative in nature, therefore requiring quantification prior to use. This study first seeks to determine the optimal quantification methodology among a set of approaches spanning three traditions, associated with Carlson-Parkin (1975), Pesaran (1984) and Seitz (1988). The success of a quantification methodology is assessed on the basis of its ability to match quantitative expectations data and on its behaviour in an important economic application, namely the modelling of wages for our sample countries. The wage equation developed here draws on the theoretical background of the staggered contracts and the wage bargaining literature, and controls carefully for inflation expectations and institutional variables. The Carlson-Parkin variation proposed in Curto Millet (2004) was found to be the most satisfactory. This being established, the wage equations are used to test the hypothesis that the advent of EMU generated an increase in labour market flexibility, which would be reflected in structural breaks. The hypothesis is essentially rejected. Finally, the properties of inflation expectations and perceptions themselves are examined, especially in the context of EMU. Both the rational expectations and rational perceptions hypotheses are rejected. Popular expectations mechanisms, such as the "rule-of-thumb" model or Akerlof et al.'s (2000) "near-rationality hypothesis" are similarly unsupported. On the other hand, evidence is found for the transmission of expert forecasts to consumer expectations in the case of the UK, as in Carroll's (2003) model. The distribution of consumer expectations and perceptions is also considered, showing a tendency for gradual (as in Mankiw and Reis, 2002) but non-rational adjustment. Expectations formation is further shown to have important qualitative features.

Der vorliegende Sammelband beruht auf Vorträgen, die im Rahmen einer studentischen Fachtagung zum Thema „Grenzüberschreitende Zusammenarbeit in Europa“ am 21. Januar 2013 an der TU Chemnitz gehalten wurden. Die Studierenden sind in den Studiengang „Europa- Studien“ eingeschrieben und haben sich in einem vorbereitenden Seminar besondere Expertise in den von ihnen bearbeiteten Themen erworben, wobei vielfach eine rechtlich-institutionelle Perspektive eingenommen wurde. / This volume is based on a students' conference on "Crossborder-co-operation in Europe" on January 21, 2013. The students are enrolled in the European Studies course and have acquired particular expertise regarding their subject within a preparatory seminar which focused on a legal-institutional perspective.