This paper estimates the dynamic effects of changes in taxes in the United States. We distinguish between the effects of changes in personal and corporate income taxes using a new narrative account of federal tax liability changes in these two tax components. We develop an estimator in which...

We examine the impact of fiscal policy interventions in an environment where the short term nominal interest rate is at the zero bound. In the basic New Keynesian model in which the monetary authority operates a Taylor rule, globally multiple equilibria arise, some of which display all the...

We use a unique dataset on television prices across European countries and regions to investigate the sources of differences in price levels. Our findings are as follows: (i) Quality is a crucial determinant of price differences. Even in an integrated economic zone as Europe, rich economies tend...

We evaluate the extent to which a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model can account for the impact of "surprise" and "anticipated" tax shocks estimated from U.S. time-series data. In U.S. data, surprise tax cuts have expansionary and persistent effects on output, consumption, investment...

We use a 12-dimensional VAR to examine the dynamic effects on the labour market of four structural technology and policy shocks. For each shock, we examine the dynamic effects on the labour market, the importance of the shock for labour market volatility, and the comovement between labour market...

Many empirical studies have applied the Hodrick-Prescott filter in cross-country comparisons of business cycle fluctuations. The Hodrick-Prescott filter involves the smoothing parameter l, and standard practice in the literature is to set this parameter equal to 1600 (in quarterly data) for all...

Using panel structural VAR analysis and quarterly data from four industrialized countries, we document that an increase in government purchases leads to an expansion in output and private consumption, a deterioration in the trade balance, and a depreciation of the real exchange rate (i.e., a...

We provide empirical evidence on the dynamic effects of tax liability changes in the United States. We distinguish between surprise and anticipated tax changes using a timing-convention. We document that pre-announced but not yet implemented tax cuts give rise to contractions in output,...

This Paper studies how the HP-Filter should be adjusted, when changing the frequency of observations. It complements the results of Baxter and King (1999) with an analytical analysis, demonstrating that the filter parameter should be adjusted by multiplying it with the fourth power of the...

This paper examines whether or not consumption risk sharing occurs in a panel of industrialized countries. We derive the international consumption insurance proposition in a simple theoretical model and show how it should be modified in more complicated models. We analyse empirically the...