The quantitative and dynamic consequence of a social VAT reform, i.e. a fiscal reform consisting in substituting VAT for social contributions, is assessed using two general equilibrium models. The first one is a Walrasian model with no other frictions than distortionary taxation of labor and...

This article proposes a theoretical framework to investigate economic robustness to exogenous shocks such as natural disasters. It is based on a dynamic model that represents a regional economy as a network of production units through the disaggregation of sectorscale Input-Output tables....

What influences banks’ borrowing costs in the unsecured money market? The objective of this paper is to test whether measures of centrality, quantifying network effects due to interactions among banks in the market, can help explain heterogeneous patterns in the interest rates paid to borrow...

We study the liquidity allocation among European banks around the Lehman Brothers’ insolvency using a novel dataset of all interbank loans settled via the Eurosystem’s payment system TARGET2. Following the Lehman insolvency, lenders in the overnight segment become sensitive to counterparty...

I study the role of shocks to beliefs combined with Bayesian learning in a standard equilibrium business cycle framework. By adapting ideas from Cogley and Sargent (2008b) to the general equilibrium setting, I am able to study how a prior belief arising from the Great Depression may have...

We study abstract macroeconomic systems in which expectations play an important role. Consistent with the recent literature on recursive learning and expectations, we replace the agents in the economy with econometricians. Unlike the recursive learning literature, however, the econometricians in...

We use the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters to characterize the dynamics of expectations at the micro level. We find that forecasters (i) have predictable forecast errors; (ii) disagree; (iii) fail to systematically update their forecasts in the wake of new information; (iv) disagree even...

We use the term structure of disagreement of professional forecasters to document a novel set of facts: (1) forecasters disagree at all horizons, including the long run; (2) the term structure of disagreement differs markedly across variables: it is downward sloping for real output growth,...

In response to the very large number of quantitative indicators that have been put forward to measure the level of systemic risk since the start of the subprime crisis, the paper surveys the different indicators available in the economic and financial literature. It distinguishes between (i)...