This paper analyzes the effectiveness of the tax and transfer systems in the European Union and the US to act as an automatic stabilizer in the current economic crisis. We find that automatic stabilizers absorb 38 per cent of a proportional income shock in the EU, compared to 32 per cent in the...

Whether observed differences in redistributive policies across countries are the result of differences in social preferences or efficiency constraints is an important question that paves the debate about the optimality of welfare regimes. To shed new light on this question, we estimate labor...

This paper analyses the long-memory properties of US and European stock indices, as well as their linkages, using fractional integration and fractional cointegration techniques. These methods are more general and have higher power than the standard ones usually employed in the literature. The...

There is clear evidence that fairness plays a role in redistribution. Individuals want to compensate others for their misfortune, while they allow them to enjoy the fruits of their effort. This paper introduces fairness in a tax-benefit scheme that is based on several characteristics in order to...

This paper examines the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on stock returns, CDS and economic activity in the US and the five European countries (the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain) which have been most affected. The sample period covers the dates from the first confirmed COVID-19 cases in...

This paper analyses the persistence and mean reversion properties of sovereign debt and its components by applying fractional integration methods to long runs of annual data starting in 1831 for the UK and the US, in 1862 for Italy and in 1881 for France and Germany, and ending in all cases in...