This paper connects two salient economic features: (i) Fiscal shocks have asymmetric effects across business cycle phases (Gechert et al., 2019); (ii) Okun's coefficient is time varying and may be unstable. The intertwined dynamic behavior of fiscal shocks and unemployment-output trade-offs are...

Short-time work is a labor market policy that subsidizes working time reductions among firms in financial difficulty to prevent layoffs. Many OECD countries have used this policy in the Great Recession. This paper shows that the effects of short-time work are strongly time dependent and...

Is there a role for debt beyond curing overaccumulation of capital? Does dynamic efficiency and the infeasibility of debt Ponzi schemes eliminate any Pareto-improving role for a government in a competitive economy with complete markets? Is there an optimal maturity structure of public debt?...

Debt-to-GDP ratios have grown to unprecedented levels in many industrialized economies. This requires disciplined consolidation efforts which are, however, supposed to come now at the wrong time with the economic recovery being fragile. Against this background, we call for a global debt brake...

The Global Crisis demonstrated to the world that Ratings Agencies had misled the public about the stability of financial institutions. The Finance literature had decided that it was impossible to have bubbles in financial markets and any surge in the stock market would be self-correcting. Recent...

We study the effect of political regime change on higher education and its distributional and political consequences. We focus on the 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile. The Pinochet dictatorship's aims of political control and fiscal conservatism led to a large reduction...

This research note discusses the Euro crisis in Greece in light of the referendum of July the 5th. It lays out the social and political costs of a GREXIT, but also of a continuing austerity policy. It proposes a reform policy fostering growth in Greece and discusses the role of conditionality....

Given the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus, the State has had to respond rapidly and quite severely to flatten the curve and slow the spread of the virus. This has had significant implications for many aspects of life with differential impacts across the population. The lack of timely...

The Great Recession and the widespread adoption of fiscal austerity policies have heightened concern about inequality and how well tax-benefit systems redistribute. We examine how the distribution of income in the EU countries which were hardest hit during the recession evolved over this time....