The paper offers an approach to assessing the sustainability of public debt taking into account the effect of fiscal policy on output, as well as uncertainty in the model parameters and system dynamics. Uncertainty is specified in general terms, and the analysis is based on the notion of...

The paper offers a non-probabilistic framework for representation of uncertainty in the context of a simple linear-quadratic model of fiscal adjustment. Instead of treating model disturbances as random variables with known probability distributions, it is only assumed that they belong to some...

This paper studies the long-run relationship between consumption, asset wealth and income - the consumption-wealth ratio - in Germany, based on data from 1980 to 2003. Earlier papers for the Anglo-Saxon economies have documented that departures of these three variables from their common trend...

Motivated by the apparent failure of the credit multiplier mechanism (CM) to deliver amplification in DSGE models, we re-examine its role in business cycles to address the question: is something wrong with the CM? Our answer is no. In coming to this answer we construct a model with reproducible...

This paper studies the effect of two labor market institutions, unemployment insurance (UI) and job search assistance (JSA), on the output cost and welfare cost of recessions. The paper develops a tractable incomplete-market model with search unemployment, skill depreciation during unemployment,...

Foreign aid is a sizable source of government financing for several developing countries and its allocation matters for the conduct of fiscal policy. This paper revisits fiscal effects of shifts in aid dependency in 59 developing countries from 1960 to 2010. It identifies structural shifts in...

We attempt to disentangle income and wealth effects on consumption by disaggregating both the different types of income and wealth. We estimate a consumption function for a panel of quarterly data for 14 advanced economies spanning 1998 to 2012, using an error correction specification. We find a...

Using a panel of 101 low- and middle-income countries with data covering the period 1980-2012, this paper applies various econometric approaches that deal with endogeneity issues to assess the impact of food price shocks on socio-political instability once fiscal policy and remittances have been...

This paper examines the impact of international financial integration on macroeconomic volatility in a large group of industrial and developing economies over the period 1960-99. We report two major results: First, while the volatility of output growth has, on average, declined in the 1990s...

This paper studies whether fiscal policy plays a stabilizing role in the context of import food price shocks. More precisely, the paper assesses whether fiscal policy dampens the adverse effect of import food price shocks on household consumption. Based on a panel of 70 low and middle-income...