We compare the transmission of fiscal shocks in four OECD countries and in the Euro area. Fiscal shocks are identified in a SVAR by the restrictions that disturbances to government consumption, government investment and government employment increase output and deficits contemporaneously. These...

This paper investigates the effects of government spending on the real exchange rate and the trade balance in the US using a new VAR identification procedure based on spending forecast revisions. I find that the real exchange rate appreciates and the trade balance deteriorates after a government...

I analyze the effects of an increase in government purchases financed entirely through seignorage, in both a classical and a New Keynesian framework, and compare them with those resulting from a more conventional debt-financed stimulus. My findings point to the importance of nominal rigidities...

This paper investigates the effects of fiscal policy on the trade balance using a structural factor model. A fiscal policy shock worsens the trade balance and produces an appreciation of the domestic currency but the effects are quantitatively small. The findings match the theoretical...

This paper uses a structural, large dimensional factor model to evaluate the role of 'news' shocks (shocks with a delayed effect on productivity) in generating the business cycle. We find that (i) existing small-scale VECM models are affected by 'non-fundamentalness' and therefore fail to...

We study the effects of government spending by using a structural, large dimensional, dynamic factor model. We find that the government spending shock is non-fundamental for the variables commonly used in the structural VAR literature, so that its impulse response functions cannot be...

Recent evidence on the effect of government spending shocks on consumption cannot be easily reconciled with existing optimizing business cycle models. We extend the standard New Keynesian model to allow for the presence of rule-of-thumb (non-Ricardian) consumers. We show how the interaction of...

We construct and calibrate a general equilibrium business cycle model with unemployment and precautionary saving. We compute the cost of business cycles and locate the optimum in a set of simple cyclical fiscal policies. Our economy exhibits productivity shocks, giving firms an incentive to hire...

We derive necessary and sufficient conditions under which a set of variables is informationally sufficient, i.e. it contains enough information to estimate the structural shocks with a VAR model. Based on such conditions, we suggest a procedure to test for informational sufficiency. Moreover, we...

We propose new indices to measure macroeconomic uncertainty. The indices measure how unexpected a realization of a representative macroeconomic variable is relative to the unconditional forecast error distribution. We use forecast error distributions based on the nowcasts and forecasts of the...