International trade in manufacturing goods has risen strongly over the past decades, contributing to the expansion of global value chains (GVCs). This paper studies how two factors contributed to this rise since 1970: (i) declining “border effects” that are arguably related to the ICT...

This study focuses on the employment effect of a hiring subsidy available to firms with less than 50 employees, granted in the context of the 2012 Spanish labour market reform. Exploiting the arbitrary firm size threshold using regression discontinuity design, estimates show on average 2...

We build a new empirical model to estimate the global impact of an increase in the volatility of US monetary policy shocks. Specifically, we admit time-varying variances of local structural shocks from a stochastic volatility specification. By allowing for rich dynamic interaction between the...

Growth of wages, unemployment, employment and vacancies exhibit strong asymmetries between expansionary and contractionary phases. In this paper we analyze to what degree downward wage rigidities in the bargaining process affect other variables of the economy. We introduce asymmetric wage...

Recent fiscal policies have aimed to stimulate household spending. In 2008, most households received one-time economic stimulus payments. In 2009, most working households received the Making Work Pay tax credit in the form of reduced withholding; other households, mainly retirees, received...

This paper assesses the usefulness of private credit variables and other macrofinancial and banking sector indicators for the setting of Basel III/CRD IV countercyclical capital buffers (CCBs) in a multivariate early warning model framework, using data for 23 EU Members States from 1982 Q2 to...

The empirical literature using vector autoregressive models to assess the effects of fiscal policy shocks strongly disagrees on even the qualitative response of key macroeconomic variables to government spending and tax shocks. We provide new evidence for the U.S. over the period 1955-2006. We...

Policy impact studies often suffer from endogeneity problems. Consider the case of the ECB Securities Markets Programme: If Eurosystem interventions were triggered by sudden and strong price deteriorations, looking at daily price changes may bias downwards the correlation between yields and the...

This paper follows the Bayesian time-varying VAR approach with stochastic volatility developed by Primiceri (2005), to analyse whether the reaction of output and prices to interest rate and exchange rate shocks has changed across time (1996-2012) in the Polish economy. The empirical findings...

The literature on fiscal multipliers finds that spending-based fiscal consolidations tend to have more benign macro-economic consequences than revenue-based consolidations. By directly comparing expost data with consolidation plans, we present evidence of a systematically weaker follow-up of...