On 3 June 2020, the German government announced a EUR 130 billion fiscal stimulus package to stimulate market demand and jumpstart the economy in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in the spring of 2020. The most prominent measure of this package is an unconventional fiscal policy in the...

This paper is based on presentation given at the June 2011 Conference of the Centre for Growth and Business Cycle Research at the University of Manchester. It reviews key features of the 2007-08 financial crisis, the subsequent 'great recession' and the European public debt problems; in the...

This paper explores a new approach to identifying government spending shocks which avoids many of the shortcomings of existing approaches. The new approach is to identify government spending shocks with statistical innovations to the accumulated excess returns of large US military contractors....

In a historical perspective, the stabilization policy regime in Sweden is in a state of constant change, affected by economic crises, international impulses, domestic politics, and developments in macroeconomic theory. Economists have been deeply involved in this process. The current framework...

The common VAT system adopted by EU member states comprises a set of various rates, which differentiate the goods and services subject to this tax. However, from a technical and management point of view, it would be preferable to adopt a single tax rate as it reduces distortions and facilitates...

This paper analyses value-added tax (VAT), with special emphasis on efficiency in the EU-28 Member States and Turkey, over the period from 2009 to 2013. From the results of the analysis, we concluded that, the highest efficiency ratio (50.8) was recorded in Croatia in 2013. This indicates that...

We use SVAR models for 18 economies to estimate how much fiscal policy deviated from pre-pandemic norms during the Covid-19 pandemic. For most countries, fiscal policy was more expansive than the pre-pandemic norm predicts based on the state of the economy during the pandemic. The size of the...