Panel data is used to investigate the extent of R and D spillovers between OECD countries, and the importance of barriers to technology adoption in affecting the benefits of such spillovers. Our results indicate that countries with less regulated goods and labour markets benefit more from...

This note analyzes consumption risk sharing among the EU-15 countries. It is found that the reaction of consumption growth rates to idiosyncratic income growth is too sensitive to be consistent with perfect risk sharing. Some evidence is presented in favor the hypothesis that institutional and...

We study the effect of the size of the welfare state on family outcomes in OECD member countries. Exploiting exogenous variation in public social spending, due to varying degrees of political fractionalization (i.e. the number of relevant parties involved in the legislative process), we show...

In this paper we evaluate the hypothesis that the Great Moderation is partly the result of a less activist monetary policy. We simulate a New Keynesian model in which the central bank can only observe a noisy estimate of the output gap and find that the less pronounced reaction of the Federal...

We study the development of bank lending in the U.S. after four large jumps in uncertainty using an event study approach. We find that more liquid banks reduce lending less than banks with smaller liquidity ratios after a surge in uncertainty. Lending by smaller banks is also less responsive to...

In this paper we evaluate the relative influence of external versus domestic inflation drivers in the 12 new European Union (EU) member countries. Our empirical analysis is based on the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) derived in Galí and Monacelli (2005) for small open economies (SOE)....

In this paper we empirically explore how characteristics of the domestic financial system influence the international allocation of consumption risk using a sample of OECD countries. Our results show that the extent of risk sharing achieved does not depend on the overall development of the...

In this paper we examine the role of labour market rigidities in the context of international consumption risk sharing. Stronger labour market regulation may make it easier to borrow against future income, thus allowing shocks to be smoothed to a greater extent. In addition, rigid labour markets...