Conventional wisdom teaches that the output response upon a fiscal expansion is higher under fixed than floating exchange rates for a small open economy. We analyse the effects of fiscal expansions using a New Keynesian model and find that this result reverses in times of sovereign default risk....

We analyze the political economy of monetary unification among countries with different quality of institutions. Countries with stronger institutions have lower public spending and better investment incentives, even under a stronger currency. Governments under weaker institutions spend more so...

Parameter estimates of structural economic models are often difficult to interpret at the light of the underlying economic theory. Bayesian methods have become increasingly popular as a tool for conducting inference on structural models since priors offer a way to exert control over the...

Cost-of-Living-Adjustment (COLA) coverage figures suggest a time variation in the degree of wage indexation. In spite of this observation, most current literature conveniently assume a constant degree of indexation as this variable is not directly observable. This study intends to empirically...

This paper first documents the increase in the time lag with which labor input reacts to output fluctuations (the labor adjustment lag) that is visible in US data since the mid-1980s. We show that a lagged labor adjustment response is optimal in a setting where there is uncertainty about the...