After the Global Financial Crisis a controversial rush to fiscal austerity followed in many countries. Yet research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates was and still is unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This paper...

Government interventions into the financial system in the form of bail out operations or liquidity assistance are often justified with the systemic importance of large banks for the real economy. In this paper, we test whether idiosyncratic shocks to loan growth at large banks have effects on...

In this paper we assess the hypothesis that the unprecedented stability of the United States economy, in the decades preceding the outbreak of the financial crisis in August 2007, caused a relatively low output volatility in other national economies. The results of the time series analysis of 97...

We estimate Okun's law, the negative relationship between output and the unemployment rate, at the sector level for the US, the UK, Japan, and Switzerland to test several hypotheses that may explain why the aggregate Okun's coeffcients are different across countries. Specifically, we show that...

We present non-linear models to capture the turning points in global economic activity as well as in advanced and emerging economies from 1980 to 2017. We first estimate Markov Switching models within a univariate framework. These models support the relevance of three business cycle regimes...

This paper studies the effects of discretionary fiscal policy on output volatility and economic growth. Using data for ninety-one countries we isolate three empirical regularities: (1) Governments that use fiscal policy aggressively induce significant macroeconomic instability; (2) The...

The recent Financial Crisis reminded us once again about the vulnerability of the global economy. Economists were forced to think about the effectiveness of their policies. During this period, many governments across the world had adopted fiscal measures to boost their local economies. The path...