German unifikation hit the West German economy in a prosperous and appeared as a huge demand shock at least for the first few quarters. This combination resulted in a major increase of imports from the main trading partners of West Germany, which may have helped to cushion recessionary trends...

We estimate the degree of 'stickiness' in aggregate consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption habits) for thirteen advanced economies. We find that, after controlling for measurement error, consumption growth has a high degree of autocorrelation, with a stickiness...

Cyclically adjusted budget balance (CAB) is a widely cited and widely used concept in the evaluation of fiscal situations. The key idea behind it involves the identification of potential levels of economic variables. There are two recently used methods: the aggregate approach and the...

In Deutschland steht wieder einmal eine große Steuerreform an. Zum Jahresbeginn 2001 soll das Steuersenkungsgesetz in Kraft treten, in dessen Zentrum grundlegende Änderungen bei der Einkommens- und Unternehmensbesteuerung stehen. Diese Steuerreform ist oft mit einer im internationalen...

We analyse the determinants of unemployment persistence in four OECDcountries byestimating a structural Bayesian VAR with an informative priorbased on an insiders/outsiders model. We explicitly insert unemployment ben-efits and labour taxes so that our identification is not affected by the Faust...

This paper uses micro data from four OECD countries (the United States, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands), to assess the determinants of household debt holding and to investigate whether or not credit constraints are important for household debt holding. We extend the existing literature in...

In this paper, we perform an empirical comparison of Italian and US business cycles. After filtering the time series of the main macroeconomic variables of the two countries, through an approximate bandpass filter, we analyze the cross-correlations between each filtered variable and the filtered...