Empirical studies typically find that private consumption is much more sensitive to changes in current disposable income than is predicted by Hall's (JPE, 1978) permanent income hypothesis. Standard explanations for this "excess sensitivity" of private consumption refer to liquidity constraints...

This paper studies the determinants of the level and the evolution of per capita hours worked in a panel of OECD countries since the 1970s. Following Pesaran (Econometrica, 2006), our empirical strategy allows for the possibility of cross-sectionally correlated error terms due to unobserved...

In a number of papers A.J. Oswald (1996, 1997) argues that high rates of home ownership may imply inferior labour market outcomes. This paper tests the Oswald hypothesis in a panel of 42 Belgian districts since the 1970s. The use of data going back to 1970 allows us to embed the Oswald...

We analyse the in uence of fiscal policy on TFP and per capita output in a panel of OECD countries since 1975. We focus on the effects of government size, government deficits and the composition of taxes and expenditures. Compared to existing studies, our contribu- tion is double. First, we are...