Rethinking Fiscal Policy after the Crisis

Ľudovít Ódor is a member of the Council for Budget Responsibility in Slovakia and Vice Chair of the Network of EU Independent Fiscal Institutions. In the past, he has served as a member of the Bank Board at the National Bank of Slovakia and Executive Director responsible for research, an advisor to the Prime Minister and as a Chief economist at the Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic. His book, The Euro Area and the Financial Crisis (Cambridge, 2014), was written with Miroslav Beblavý and David Cobham.

• 1. Introduction and overview Ľudovít Ódor; Part I. Frontiers of Fiscal Policy: 2. Fiscal analysis is darned hard Eric M. Leeper; 3. Fiscal implications of central bank balance sheet policies Athanasios Orphanides; Part II. Better Institutions for Better Fiscal Policy: 4. Fiscal rules in the world Klaus Schmidt-Hebbel and Raimundo Soto; 5. Fiscal councils: rational and effectiveness Roel W. M. J. Beetsma and Xavier Debrun; 6. Fiscal discipline in a monetary union without fiscal union Charles Wyplosz; 7. Lost in complexity. Towards a decentralised and de-politicised fiscal framework in Europe Ľudovít Ódor and Gábor P. Kiss; 8. Partial fiscalisation: some historical lessons on Europe´s unfinished business Michael Bordo and Harold James; 9. Managing the euro area debt crisis George Kopits; Part III. New Analytical Perspectives: 10. Problems with deficit accounting Jerry R. Green and Laurence J. Kotlikoff; 11. Fiscal policy and financial distress: a balance sheet perspective John Fitzgerald and Philip R. Lane; 12. Financial cycles and fiscal cycles Agustín S. Bénétrix and Philip R. Lane; 13. Fiscal sustainability and the financial cycle Claudio Borio, Marco Lombardi and Fabrizio Zampolli; 14. Calibrating the cost of defaulting in models of sovereign defaults Juan Carlos Hatchondo and Leonardo Martinez; Part IV. The Comeback of Discretionary Fiscal Policy: 15. What do we know about fiscal multipliers? Carlo Favero and Madina Karamysheva; 16. Government as borrower and innovator of last resort Richard C. Koo; 17. Fiscal consolidation strategies Christian Kastrop, Boris Cournéde, Falilou Fall and Annabelle Mourougane; 18. Discretionary fiscal policy and recessions Fabrizio Coricelli, Riccardo Fiorito and Francesco Molteni.

'We are now about eight years into the global financial crisis and we are slowly emerging from it, but not quite out of the woods yet. This is a respectable amount of time, however, to begin to reflect upon what has been happening and to look for lessons learned. Undoubtedly there has been an avalanche of papers and books written from a variety of perspectives on the global financial crisis. This book is different. Firstly, it examines fiscal dimensions of the crisis. This is an area that has not attracted the attention that it should. Secondly, it blends practitioner and academic perspectives with an attention to the detail of policy institutions which is absent from other attempts.' Peter M. Jackson, University of Leicester