The recent crisis in the United States has often been associated with substantial amounts of policy uncertainty. In this paper we ask how uncertainty about fiscal policy affects the impact of fiscal policy changes on the economy when the government tries to counteract a deep recession. The...

In this paper an anti-cyclical fiscal policy rule is introduced into a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with New-Keynesian features. The rule allows the deficit to deviate from target in proportion to the impact of automatic stabilisers while any additional impact on the deficit, for...

Does the state of the business cycle matter for the effects of fiscal policy shocks on GDP? This study analyses quarterly German data from 1976 to 2009 in a threshold SVAR, expanding the SVAR approach by Blanchard and Perotti (2002). In a linear benchmark SVAR, the analysis finds that hiking...

This paper uses an extended version of 'FiMod - A DSGE Model for Fiscal Policy Simulations' (Stähler and Thomas, 2011) with endogenous job destruction decisions by private firms to analyze the effects of several currently discussed labor market reforms on the Spanish economy. The main focus is...

This paper develops a medium-scale dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium (DSGE) model for fiscal policy simulations. Relative to existingmodels of this type, our model incorporates a two-country monetary union structure, which makes it well suited to simulate fiscal measures by relatively...

The aim of this paper is to study the optimal duration of unemployment benefit entitlement duration across the business cycle. We wonder if the entitlement duration should be prolonged in bad and shortened in good times. Because of consumption smoothing, such a countercyclical policy can be...

In a New Keynesian DSGE model with labor market frictions and liquidity-constrained consumers aggregate unemployment is likely to increase due to a non-persistent government spending shock. Furthermore, the group of asset-holding households reacts very differently from the group of...

In a New Keynesian DSGE model with non-Ricardian consumers, we show that automatic stabilization according to a countercyclical spending rule following the idea of the debt brake is well suited both to steer the economy and in terms of welfare. In particular, the adjustment account set up to...

In a real business cycle model with labor market frictions, we find that a more progressive tax schedule reduces structural unemployment as it fosters long-run incentives for job creation. Because there exists an optimal level of unemployment in a matching environment ('Hosios condition'), tax...

We investigate whether frictions in US financial markets amplify the international propagation of US financial shocks. The dynamics of the US economy is modeled jointly with global macroeconomic and financial variables using a threshold vector autoregression that allows us to capture...