This paper investigates the role of fiscal policies over the aggregate EMU business cycle. Previous studies, based on the assumption of non-separability between public and private consumption, obtain a large public consumption multiplier, a small fraction of non-Ricardian households and,...

This paper investigates which shocks drive asynchrony of business cycles in the euro area. Thereby, it unites two strands of literature, those on common features and on structural VAR analysis. In particular, we show that the presence of a common cycle implies collinearity of structural impulse...

In this paper we estimate a Bayesian vector autoregressive model with factor stochastic volatility in the error term to assess the effects of an uncertainty shock in the Euro area. This allows us to treat macroeconomic uncertainty as a latent quantity during estimation. Only a limited number of...

We show that the news is a rich source of data on distressed firm links that drive firm- level and aggregate risks. The news tends to report about links in which a less popular firm is distressed and may contaminate a more popular firm. This constitutes a contagion channel that yields...

We use the time series variation in the World Bank's "distance to frontier" estimates of the ease of doing business to assess the effects of changes in this variable on real GDP per capita. The use of Vector Autoregression techniques allows us to identify shocks to the ease of doing business...

This paper constructs the first estimates of Irish regional GDP over the twentieth century and traces the relative economic performance of Ireland's regions since independence. Using an array of data sources available at a county level, output in Agriculture, Industry and Services in benchmark...