We investigate the effects of government expenditure on private consumption when the private sector anticipates the fiscal shocks. In order to capture anticipation of fiscal policy, we develop a new method based on a structural vector autoregression (SVAR). By simulating data from a theoretical...

How does private consumption react to an exogenous increase in government expenditure? Standard structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) usually report a positive GDP as well as consumption response, while event studies report a negative consumption response. We investigate in a SVAR whether...

The Bank of England, the Federal Reserve (Fed) and the European Central Bank (ECB) have responded to the crisis with exceptional initiatives resulting in a major increase in their balance sheets. After the ECB's end-2011 launch of three-year bank refinancing (LTRO), there has been speculation...

We disentangle different driving factors of sovereign bond market integration by studying yield co-movements of EMU countries, the UK, the US and 16 German Länder in the last 15 years. At a low frequency of weeks, bond market integration has increased gradually in the course of the last 15...

We propose a method for indentifying discretionary fiscal policy with real time data. The starting point is the observation that automatic stabilizers should depend on true GDP, while discretionary fiscal policy depends on the information that policy makers have in real time. We approximate the...

We analyse and assess the economic potential and risk of crypto assets and discuss key regulatory questions that European Union policymakers need to confront. Crypto assets can be broadly classified as cryptocurrencies – a private means of payment – and initial coin offerings (ICOs),...