Using a novel measure of industry exposure to government spending, we document predictable variation in cash flows and stock returns over political cycles. During Democratic presidencies, firms with high government exposure experience higher cash flows and stock returns, while the opposite...

In this paper, Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) models of quarterly data between 2007 and 2021 are estimated to assess short-term regimes of aggregate demand and distribution in Germany. The obtained Impulse Response Functions (IRFs) of the conventional neo-Goodwinian baseline case, with...

This paper develops a sufficient-statistic formula for the unemployment gap-the difference between the actual unemployment rate and the efficient unemployment rate. While lowering unemployment puts more people into work, it forces firms to post more vacancies and to devote more resources to...

This chapter reviews and synthesizes our current understanding of the shocks that drive economic fluctuations. The chapter begins with an illustration of the problem of identifying macroeconomic shocks, followed by an overview of the many recent innovations for identifying shocks. It then...

We use data on the subjective well-being of more than a quarter of a million people living in the OECD over the period 1975-92 to study the behavior of partisan social happiness functions. Controlling for personal characteristics of the respondents, year and country fixed effects and country...