We analyze the contribution of credit spread, house and stock price shocks to GDP growth in the US based on a Bayesian VAR with time-varying parameters estimated over 1958-2012. Our main findings are: (i) The contribution of financial shocks to GDP growth fluctuates from about 20 percent in...

The VAR/SVAR (Vector Autoregressive and Structural Vector Autoregressive) models are the cornerstone of the contemporaneous empirical macroeconomic research, in particular for being able to measure the impact of fiscal policy shocks. They may be employed as atheoretical models, as well as a mean...

We show in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework that the introduction of a common currency by a group of countries with only partially integrated goods markets, incomplete financial markets and no labor migration across member states, significantly increases volatility of...

We analyze the positive and normative effects of a progressive tax on wages in a nonlinear New Keynesian DSGE model in the presence of demand and technology shocks. The non-linearity allows us to disentangle the effects of the progressive tax on the volatility and the level of macroeconomic...

This paper revisits the personal expenditure tax (PET), the most prominent version of a progressive consumption tax. The PET has a long intellectual tradition in economics, and the merits and demerits of this alternative to the personal income tax have been discussed at length. What has been...

This paper investigates to what extent Chinese monetary policy is constrained by the dollar peg. To this end, we use a cointegration framework to examine whether Chinese interest rates are driven by the Fed's policy. In a second step, we estimate a monetary model for China, in which we include...

We assess the transmission of monetary policy shocks on oil prices using a VAR model. We identify monetary policy and financial activity shocks disentangled from demand and oil supply shocks using sign restrictions. We obtain the following main findings. (i) Monetary policy and financial...

We assess the macroeconomic effects of the Eurosystem's asset purchases on the four largest euro area economies using simulation exercises that combine unconventional monetary policy shocks with a fixed policy rate for the duration of the purchase programme. We identify unconventional monetary...

The European Central Bank (ECB) has adopted a mixture of conventional and unconventional tools in order to achieve its mandate of price stability in the current low-inflation, low-interest-rate scenario. This paper contributes to the existing literature by providing a taxonomy of the ECB’s...

This paper empirically investigates the role of long-term inflation expectations for the monetary transmission mechanism. In contrast to earlier studies, we confirm that U.S. long-term inflation expectations respond significantly to a monetary policy shock. In line with a re-anchoring channel of...