"Oil price shocks have figured prominently in U.S. business cycles since the end of World War II--although the relationship seems to have weakened during the 1990s. In addition the economy appears to respond asymmetrically to oil price shocks, rising oil prices hurt economic activity more than...

"In the literature neither taxes, government spending nor deficits are robustly correlated with economic growth when evaluated individually. The lack of correlation may arise from the inability of any single budgetary component to fully capture the stance of fiscal policy. We use pair-wise...