Search results

The purpose of this study is to provide new insights into the relationship between fiscal policy and total factor productivity (TFP) while accounting for several economic and econometric issues of the phenomenon like non-stationarity, fiscal feedback effects, persistence in productivity, country heterogeneity and unobserved global shocks and local spillovers affecting heterogeneously the countries in the sample.

The paper is empirical. It builds an Error Correction Model (ECM) specification within a dynamic heterogeneous framework with common correlated effects and models both reverse causality and feedback effects.

The results of this study highlight some new findings relative to the existing related literature. The outcomes suggest some relevant evidence at both the academic and policy levels: (1) the causal effects going from fiscal deficit/surplus to TFP are heterogeneous across countries; (2) the effects depend on the time horizon considered; (3) the long-run dynamics of TFP are positively impacted by improvements in fiscal budget, but only if the austerity measures do not exert slowdowns in aggregate growth.

The main originality of this study is methodological, with possible extensions to related phenomena. Relative to the existing literature, the gains of this study rely on the way econometric techniques, recently proposed in the literature, are adapted to the economic relationship of interest. The endogeneity due to the existence of reverse causality is modelled without implying relevant performance losses of the models. Moreover, this is the first article that questions whether the effects of fiscal budget on productivity depend on the impact of the former on aggregate output growth, thus emphasising the importance of the quality of fiscal adjustments.

Our purpose is the examination of the effects of fiscal policy on private lending for the Eurozone countries. The emphasis is on the identification of the time path of government spending and bank lending.

Fiscal policy is a main factor of macroeconomic stability for the euro area economy. This paper, investigates the impact of government spending on bank lending. For this reason, we present a dynamic theoretical model with a perfectly competitive banking sector, estimated using panel cointegration for the Eurozone countries from 2000Q1 to 2022Q2.

Our findings highlight that, in the long run, consistent management of government spending can have a beneficial multiplicative impact on bank lending for housing and business reasons. This finding is stronger in magnitude for business versus housing lending. The high level of homogeneity of our results across Eurozone countries has positive implications for a common fiscal policy in the future. Finally, authorities should know that policy adjustments are quicker in housing lending when compared to business lending.

In this paper, we contribute to the existing literature, concentrating on the investigation of any existence of long-run and short-run relationships between government spending and bank lending. Additionally, our analysis allows one to investigate the contribution of each Eurozone member state in the short-run and long-run model’s dynamics, providing significant outcomes for the implementation of economic policy and the need for fiscal discipline in the Eurozone.

Conventional sportswear design does not take into account body size changes that many individuals experience (e.g. through pregnancy, puberty, menstruation, etc.). This paper aims to detail both the construction of a novel wearable shape-adaptive composite and a new meso-scale material design method, which enables the optimal creation of these structures.

This work reports the development of a predictive computational model and a corresponding design tool, including results of a tensile testing protocol to validate their outputs. A mathematical model was developed to explore the geometric parameter space of a bi-stable composite system, which then feeds into an optimization design tool.

The authors found that it is possible to fabricate shape-adaptive composites via 3D printing bi-stable structures, and adhering them to a base textile. Experimental mechanical tensile testing showed good agreement with the predictive model in mid-range unit cell amplitude designs. To illustrate how the optimization design tool works this paper details two design examples, one for expected shape change during pregnancy and one for targeted compression for high performance swimwear. The optimized design parameters are shown to replicate the target parameters, however there is potential for further improvement with a lower stiffness base textile.

Although there is a wealth of research on multi-stable mechanisms, there is a dearth of studies that apply these structures in the wearable composite space. Additionally, there is a need for design methods which leverage the structurally-programmable capabilities of multi-stable structures to create optimized, high-performance functional composites.