The recent debt crises in Europe and the U.S. states feature similar sharp increases in spreads on government debt but also show important differences. In Europe, the crisis occurred at high government indebtedness levels and had spillovers to the private sector. In the United States, state...

This Working Paper examines options for the design of a workable fiscal union for the euro area. It provides a comparative study of fiscal institutions in the US and euro area in order to supply lessons from the operation of the US fiscal regime that could inform the design of the, hitherto...

This paper analyses the role of banks in financing SMEs in Britain and Germany. It applies a sociological institutionalist approach to understand how banks construct and manage risk, relating to SME business. The empirical analysis is based on the results of a comparative survey of a sample of...

We assess the role of financial linkages for the transmission of sovereign risk in the Euro Crisis. Building on the narrative approach by Romer and Romer (1989), we use financial news to identify structural shocks in a VAR model of daily sovereign CDS for eleven European countries. To estimate...

This paper deploys a simple stock-flow consistent (SFC) model in order to examine various contentions regarding fiscal and monetary policy. It follows from the model that if the fiscal stance is not set in the appropriate fashionthat is, at a well-defined level and growth ratethen full...

This paper investigates empirically the relationship between the pattern of fiscal policy and the demand for international reserves in developing countries, and how this relationship is associated with political risk and conditional access to global capital markets. It finds evidence that for...

With the global crisis, the policy stance around the world has been shaken by massive government and central bank efforts to prevent the meltdown of markets, banks, and the economy. Fiscal packages, in varied sizes, have been adopted throughout the world after years of proclaimed fiscal...

Recent research in both the social and natural sciences has been devoted to increasing our ability to predict disasters, prepare for them and mitigate their costs. Curiously, we appear to know very little about the fiscal consequences of disasters. The likely fiscal impact of a natural disaster...

We propose several connectedness measures built from pieces of variance decompositions, and we argue that they provide natural and insightful measures of connectedness among financial asset returns and volatilities. We also show that variance decompositions define weighted, directed networks, so...

Financial market crises with the threat of a subsequent debt-deflation depression have occurred with increasing regularity in the United States from 1980 through the present. Almost reflexively, when confronted with such circumstances, US institutions and the policymakers that run them have...