Recent work on financial frictions in New Keynesian models suggest that there is a sizable spread between the risk-less interest rate and the borrowing rate. We analyze the optimal policy mix of monetary and fiscal authorities in a currency union with a country-specific credit spread by...

This paper examines the policy rate recommendations of the Bank of Canada's Governing Council (GC) and the C.D. Howe Institute's Monetary Policy Council (MPC) since 2003. We find, first, that differences in the median recommendations between the MPC and the GC are persistent but small (i.e., 25...

A common finding in the literature is that forward guidance cannot be credible under discretionary policy as long as the zero lower bound is an one-off event. However, this is not the case when recurring episodes of zero interest rates are possible. In this paper, we contribute to this new...

The European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England (BoE) are shadowed by professionals and academic economists who provide a separate policy rate recommendation in advance of the central bank's announcement. We explore differences between shadow and actual committee decisions based on an...

This paper provides background information and basic descriptive statistics for a representative survey of the New Zealand population conducted on our behalf by Research New Zealand in May 2016. The survey addresses important fiscal and monetary policy issues, including: (1) public preferences...

We study state-dependent effects of narratively identified tax shocks in Germany and the UK over the period 1974Q1-2018Q4 using local projections. In addition, we distinguish between aggregated and disaggregated tax types (direct and indirect taxes) as well as look for possible asymmetries...

I study the spill-over effects of legislated discretionary tax changes in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom to 11 Eurozone countries for the period 1980Q1-2018Q4 employing Local Projections (Jordà, 2005). In general, I find spillovers from US tax legislation to have the...

We study the announcement effect of legislated tax changes on GDP in the US, Germany, and the UK. Using, as the shock of interest, narratively identified information (Romer & Romer, 2009) about future tax changes at the quarter of their introduction to the legislative body, we analyse the...

We examine monetary and fiscal interactions in a monetary union model with uncertainty due to imperfect central bank transparency. It is first shown that monetary uncertainty discourages excessive taxation and may thus reduce average inflation and output distortions. However, as countries enter...

This paper investigates whether the socioeconomic status of the head of government helps explain fiscal performance. Applying sociological research that attributes differences in people's ways of thinking and acting to their relative standing within society, we test whether the social status of...