Official development assistance is a key source of external finance in many developing countries. A striking feature of these aid flows is their positive correlation with the business cycle of recipient countries. This pattern is puzzling in that it reinforces recipients' already strong and...

This paper documents that developing countries with opaque institutions receive procyclical development aid and procyclical promises of future aid while developing countries with transparent institutions receive countercyclical aid. It provides a dynamic equilibrium model of optimal aid policy...

The present paper contributes to the literature by providing arguments and evidence on volatility of government expenditure, especially social spending and the role of foreign aid. Empirical findings from government spending data for 27 countries between 1990 and 2008 suggest that social...

This paper contributes to the large debate regarding the impact of oil price changes on U.S. GDP growth. Firstly, it replicates empirical findings of prominent studies and finds that the proposed oil price measures have a dissipating effect with recent data up to 2016Q4. Secondly, it re-examines...

The global recession has strongly affected the credibility of the international banking system, damaging also the real economy.Developing countries, not fully integrated with international markets, seem less affected and local microfinance institutions might also allow for a further shelter...

We estimate short- and long-run tax elasticities that capture the relationship between changes in national income and tax revenue. We show that the short-run tax elasticity changes according to the business cycle. We estimate a two state Markov-switching regression on a novel dataset of tax...

The change of national income brings about tax revenue change. This relationship is embodied in the tax elasticity and usefully estimated both for the long-run and the short-run. In this paper we show that the short-run tax elasticity - the percent change in the tax revenue in response to a one...

Using longitudinal social security data, this study finds evidence of weak real wage cyclicality in Spain throughout 1988 - 2011. The baseline estimate of a 0.4 % increase in wages in response to a one percentage point decline in the unemployment rate lies in the lower bound of available...

Using a representative establishment data set for Germany, we show that, in line with the existing literature for several countries, firms' adjustment costs for employment are characterized by a fixed and convex functional form. Furthermore, they are asymmetric with dismissal costs exceeding...