This thesis presents four essays that study the determinants of private household debt and the relation between private indebtedness and macroeconomic activity. Chapter 1 shows that inequality and household debt are cointegrated of order one and therefore share a common trending relation. In...

We estimate the effect of government spending shocks on the US economy with a time-varying parameter vector autoregression. The recent Great Recession period appears to be characterized by uniquely large impulse responses of output to fiscal shocks. Moreover, the particularity of this period is...

We estimate the effect of government spending shocks on the US economy with a time-varying parameter vector autoregression. The recent Great Recession period appears to be characterized by uniquely large impulse responses of output to fiscal shocks. Moreover, the particularity of this period is...