This paper uses a range of structural VARs to show that the response of US stock prices to fiscal shocks changed in 1980. Over the period 1955-1979 an expansionary spending or revenue shock was associated with modestly higher stock prices. After 1980, along with a decline in the fiscal...

Monetary developments of recent decades began with much promise with inflation targeting by independent central banks; the financial crisis of 2007 ushered in a period of great monetary instability. There are lessons for a return to more stability. Central banks need to stabilize money supply...

We test for fiscal policy sustainability in the UK for the period 1955-2006. We find evidence of sustainability with three structural breaks, respectively occurring in the early 1970s, early 1980s and late 1990s. UK fiscal policy has been sustainable throughout the sample period except from...

Was Spanish fiscal policy destabilizing? We estimate policy reaction functions and test the impact of fiscal shocks on growth volatility over the period 19501998. We find that a transition from pro-cyclical to countercyclical fiscal policy occurred in the late years of the Franco regime,...

In this paper we consider the entry and exit of firms in a Ramsey model with capital and an endogenous labour supply. At the firm level, there is a fixed cost combined with increasing marginal cost, which gives a standard U-shaped cost curve with optimal firm size. The costs of entry (exit) are...

This paper finds that labor tax cut can be an effective policy tool to mitigate the negative effects of a shock that made the zero lower bound on the nominal interest rate binding if the economy features rule-of-thumb households (besides Ricardian ones) and nominal rigidities in prices and...

We construct a macro DSGE model of the eurozone and its two main regions, the North and the South, with the aim of matching the macro facts of these economies by indirect inference and using the resulting empirically-based model to assess possible new policy regimes. The model we have found to...

A canonical DSGE model for housing, extended to embrace government spending and governmentinvestment, is estimated on Chinese data to evaluate the impact of Öscal policy on house prices. Govern-ment spending substitutes for housing; a rise in government spending lowers house prices, but its...

This paper explores the link between default risk and fiscal procyclicality. We show that countries with higher sovereign risk have a more procyclical fiscal expenditure policy, which is driven mostly by transfers. We build a small open economy model with income inequality, social transfers, and...

Considerable micro-level evidence suggests that price/wage contract durations fluctuate with the state of the economy, particularly inflation; nonetheless, macro-level evidence for this is scarce. We incorporate state-dependent price/wage setting into an open economy DSGE model to investigate...