Unconventional fiscal policy uses announcements of future increases in consumption taxes to generate inflation expectations and accelerate consumption expenditure. It is budget neutral and time consistent. We exploit a unique natural experiment for an empirical test of the effectiveness of...

Unconventional fiscal policy uses announcements of future increases in consumption taxes to generate inflation expectations and accelerate consumption expenditure. It is budget neutral and time consistent. We provide preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of such policies using changes in...

Unconventional fiscal policies incentivize households to accelerate consumption by generating future consumer price ination, and offer an alternative to unconventional monetary policy (Correia et al. (2013)). We use a natural experiment to study the causal effect of unconventional fiscal...

This paper presents the first MIMIC (multiple indicator multiple causes) model estimate of the size and development of the shadow economy and of do-it-yourself (DIY) activities in Germany from 1970 to 2005. By 2005, they reached a level of about 17% and 4.94%. While the shadow economy has...

Using the MIMIC method, this paper is a first attempt to estimate the size of the shadow economy of 158 countries over the period 1991 up to 2015. In addition to performing a variety of robustness tests, this paper explicitly addresses endogeneity concerns to the use of GDP as cause and...

We propose a nonparametric method to test which characteristics provide independent information for the cross section of expected returns. We use the adaptive group LASSO to select characteristics and to estimate how they affect expected returns nonparametrically. Our method can handle a large...

The frequency with which firms adjust output prices helps explain persistent differences in capital structure across firms. Unconditionally, the most exible-price firms have a 19% higher long-term leverage ratio than the most sticky-price firms, controlling for known determinants of capital...

We propose a nonparametric method to study which characteristics provide incremental information for the cross section of expected returns. We use the adaptive group LASSO to select characteristics and to estimate how they affect expected returns nonparametrically. Our method can handle a large...

Estimations of the size and development of the shadow economy for 145 countries, including developing, transition and highly developed OECD economies over the period 1999 to 2003 are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (as a percent of "official" GDP) in 2002/03 in 96 developing...