This paper considers how environmental policies should respond to macroeconomic downturns. It first explores the implications of the global economic downturn of 2008-09 for environmental policies, focusing in particular on the example of action against climate change. The arguments for and...

We quantify the fiscal multipliers in response to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. We extend the benchmark Smets-Wouters (Smets and Wouters, 2007) New Keynesian model, allowing for credit-constrained households, the zero lower bound, government capital and distortionary...

The impact of EU Cohesion Policy has mainly been evaluated with regard to its growth effects. We extend the perspective by investigating the impact of EU Cohesion Policy on public investments and budget deficits in order to learn more about the channels through which this policy field works....

This paper explores the long run relationship between public and private investment in the euro area in terms of capital stocks and gross investment flows. Panel techniques ac-counting for international spillovers are employed. While private and public capital stocks are cointegrated, the...

In this paper we try to estimate the impact of Structural Funds on the growth rates of Objective 1 European regions during the two first Programming periods (1989-2000). For that purpose, we develop a ''hybrid'' model of economic growth that partially endogenizes the rate of technical progress...

This paper studies the variable impact of the global economic crisis on the post-communist countries of South East Europe and Turkey. The central question is whether the institutional reforms introduced in the former group of countries during the transition period have improved their ability to...

A government policy regarding the reduction of state shares in state-owned enterprises (SOE) triggered a crash in the Chinese stock market. The sus- tained depression even after policy adjustments constitutes a puzzle— the so called “state-share paradox.”The empirical evidence shows...

Economic hardship is strongly reflected by the housing market. It is the concern of much research, but its analysis is often obstructed by insufficient lagged data. This paper evaluates search intensity for "hardship letter" from Google Insights to detect ensuing mortgage delinquencies. Such...

This paper is concerned with ex ante and ex post counterfactual analyses in the case of macroeconometric applications where a single unit is observed before and after a given policy intervention. It distinguishes between cases where the policy change affects the model's parameters and where it...

The year 2003 has witnessed several major reform policy initiatives in Germany intended to contribute to a solution to Germany's high unemployment problem and to improve the longrun sustainability of its social welfare policies. These economic reforms are discussed within a larger macroeconomic...