Growth and business cycles have a long tradition of being studied separately. However, events such as the Great Recession raise concerns that severe downturns may have detrimental implications for growth. If so, what policies may help alleviate such long-lasting effects of large recessions? To...

Building on the automatic fiscal stabilisers literature, this paper assesses how automatic stabilisers have evolved over the past two decades by analysing changes in the personal income tax and social benefit systems. In three-quarters of the 35 OECD countries analysed, indicators of the...

Using loan-level data covering almost all loans to households and businesses from banks in Italy over the past 20 years, we offer new empirical evidence that credit declines during a recession primarily because of the reduction in the net creation of borrowers. We then build on a flow approach...

The paper reviews adjustment dynamics in the EMU on the basis of estimated DSGE models for four large EA Member States (DE, FR, IT, ES). We compare the response of the four countries to identical shocks and find a particularly strong response of employment and wages in ES, a high sensitivity of...