In the last decades, the majority of OECD countries has experienced a continuous increase in public debt. The European debt crisis has prompted a fundamental re‐evaluation of public debt sustainability and the looming threat of sovereign debt default. Due to a multitude of large scale events...

We study the relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth for 23 OECD countries from 1975 to 2001 by using new panel data on sub-federal tax autonomy. While initial estimations suggest that fiscal decentralization causes lower growth rates, we find that this result is not...

Over 10 years ago, Feld and Voigt (2003) introduced the first indicator for objectively measuring the actual independence of the judiciary and demonstrated its utility in a large cross-section of countries. The indicator has been widely used, but also criticized. This paper presents more recent...

This paper provides new evidence on the sustainability of public finances in German states (Laender) by exploiting a newly compiled database covering the years 1950‐2011. Unlike previous studies on Germany, we analyze fiscal sustainability by applying “second generation” panel...

Futures markets are a potentially valuable source of information about price expectations. Exploiting this information has proved difficult in practice, because time-varying risk premia often render the futures price a poor measure of the market expectation of the price of the underlying asset....

Some observers have conjectured that the steep decline in the price of oil between June and December 2014 resulted from positive oil supply shocks in the second half of 2014. Others have suggested that a major shock to oil price expectations occurred when in late November 2014 OPEC announced...

We explore the effect on U.S. real GDP growth of the sharp and sustained decline in the global price of crude oil and hence in the U.S. price of gasoline after June 2014. Our analysis suggests that this decline produced a cumulative stimulus of about 0.9 percentage points of real GDP growth by...