Can discretionary increases in government spending stimulate the economy? We answer this question by taking into account both the information flow on fiscal measures and the role played by information frictions. Using a novel set of empirical proxies for fiscal news and agents' misperceptions,...

In the presence of the zero lower bound, standard business cycle models with a Taylor-type monetary policy rule are prone to equilibrium multiplicity. A drop in confidence can drive the economy into a liquidity trap without any change in fundamentals. Using a prototypical sticky-price model, I...

In this paper, we propose a time-varying parameter VAR model with stochastic volatility which allows for estimation on data sampled at different frequencies. Our contribution is twofold. First, we extend the methodology developed by Cogley and Sargent (2005), and Primiceri (2005), to a...

In this paper we explore the impact of fiscal austerity on three different dimensions of public opinion (overall life satisfaction and confidence, attitude towards national authorities, and European institutions). Based on a panel of 26 EU countries, we find that, overall, fiscal consolidation...

We investigate the effects of fiscal policy communication on the propagation of government spending shocks. To this aim, we propose a new index measuring the coordination effects of policy communication on private agents' expectations. This index is based on the disagreement amongst US...

We study the incidence and severity of lower-bound episodes and the efficacy of three types of state-dependent policies—forward guidance about the future path of interest rates, large-scale asset purchases and spending-based fiscal stimulus—in ameliorating the adverse consequences stemming...

We quantify the size of fiscal multipliers under financial fragmentation risk and demonstrate how non-standard monetary policy can support the macroeconomic transmission of fiscal interventions. We employ a DSGE model with financial frictions whereby the interplay of corporate, banks and...

This paper offers a framework to study commitment and cooperation issues in games with multiple policymakers. To reconcile some puzzles in the recent literature on the nature of policy interactions among nations, we prove that games characterized by different commitment and cooperation schemes...

We study optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a New Keynesian model where occasional declines in agents' confidence can give rise to persistent liquidity trap episodes. Unlike in the case of fundamental-driven liquidity traps, there is no straightforward recipe for mitigating the welfare costs...

In this paper we analyse the interaction of fiscal rules and fiscal space. We find strong evidence for fiscal rules being associated with higher fiscal space. Furthermore, the analysis shows that countries with more fiscal space tend to have higher discretionary expenditures, but that this...