The global financial crisis has lead to a renewed interest in discretionary fiscal stimulus. Advocates of discretionary measures emphasize that government spending can stimulate additional private spending - the Keynesian multiplier effect. Thus, we investigate whether the spending package...

Renewed interest in fiscal policy has increased the use of quantitative models to evaluate policy. Because of modelling uncertainty, it is essential that policy evaluations be robust to alternative assumptions. We find that models currently being used in practice to evaluate fiscal policy...

The purpose of the paper is to design optimal monetary policy rules in a New-Keynesian model featuring the presence of non-atomistic unions.It is shown that concentrated labor markets call for more aggressive inflation stabilization. This is because the central bank is able to induce wage...

We revisit the so-called "secular international problem", whereby the adjustment of current account imbalances purportedly falls entirely on the shoulders of deficit countries. We introduce a stylised model to rationalise an asymmetric counter-cyclical policy reaction that is stronger for...

This paper investigates the determinants of the service sector employment share in the EU-15, for the aggregate service sector, four sub-sectors and twelve service sector branches. Recently, both Europe and the US have experienced an increase in the share of service-related jobs in total...

This paper models volatility spillovers from mature to emerging stock markets, tests for changes in the transmission mechanism during turbulences in mature markets, and examines the implications for conditional correlations between mature and emerging market returns. Tri-variate GARCH-BEKK...