Empirical evidence documents a discernible negative relationship between government size, as measured by income tax rates and the output share of government purchases, and the magnitude of macroeconomic fluctuations in OECD countries since 1960. This implies that both taxes and public spending...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that private consumption is crowded-in by government spending. This outcome violates existing macroeconomic theory, according to which the negative wealth effect brought about by a rise in public expenditure should decrease consumption. In this paper, we...

Today?s level of financial integration and development of international capital markets is often compared to the pre-World War I Gold Standard. However, the propensity to currency crises seems higher today than in the past. Furthermore, the dynamics of crises has changed: In the most recent...

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...

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...

The high real wage story is one of the leading hypotheses for how deflation caused the International Great Depression. The story is that world-wide deflation, combined with incomplete nominal wage adjustment, raised real wages in a number of countries, and these higher real wages reduced...

How large are welfare costs related to economic aggregate fluctuations is a topic of great concern among economists at least since Robert Lucas’ well-known and thoughtprovoking exercise in the late 1980s. Our analysis assesses the magnitude of such costs for 11 countries in South America...

Macroeconomic time series are often obtained as an aggregate across regions or economic sectors. Even when the ultimate goal is to forecast the aggregate series it may be beneficial to consider the underlying disaggregate series. This especially holds when the disaggregate series are generated...

In this paper, we study implications of quasi-geometric discounting for stochastic properties of asset returns that can be observed in the financial market data. In particular, we emphasize that the dividend income from an asset measured in a unit of account may not reflect the whole dividend...

We study a model with a durable good subject to abrupt, periodic obsolescence, and characterize the optimal purchasing policy. Consumers optimally synchronize new purchases with the arrival of new durable models. Hence, some agents use a "flexible" optimal replacement rule that switches between...