The use of large fiscal stimulus packages to dampen the impact of Covid-19 recently has raised concerns about the effectiveness of the discretionary fiscal policy. This paper aims at analysing the feasibility of automatic fiscal stabilisers to mitigate economic fluctuations in the case of...

This paper develops a two-block Structural Vector Autoregression featuring time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility to estimate the changing spillover of global oil shocks into the Maltese economy during the period that goes from January 2008 to March 2022. The model is estimated by...

Luigi Barone’s famous curve offers an excellent framework for the study of the microeconomic and macroeconomic implications of innovation and imitation. However, neither Barone nor his epig- ones have been able to sufficiently "exploit" his contribution to date. Complementing his analysis of...

Investment in natural capital is increasingly necessary and urgent considering the increasing loss of global bio- diversity and the associated social and economic losses. Ecosystem services are tools for quantifying the stock of natural capital and there is great concern about their assessment...

This paper delivers new evidence for European countries on the role of a wide range of policies for workers’ mobility in terms of hiring transitions into jobs, with an emphasis on differences across socio-economic groups. Labour market transitions are relevant in the current context where the...

The "histogram method" (Young, 2010), while the standard approach for analyzing distributional dynamics in heterogeneous agent models, is linear in optimal policies. We introduce a novel method that captures nonlinearities of distributional dynamics. This method solves the distributional...

This paper examines the characteristics of downturns and subsequent recoveries following past banking crises in OECD countries as well as evidence of any effects on potential output growth. It is differentiated from previous analyses because it makes use of OECD measures of the output gap and...

This paper analyses the reaction of fiscal policy to the cycle in OECD countries. The results suggest that while overall government balances were counter-cyclical in the past and more so in economic downturns than in upswings, discretionary fiscal policy was neutral on average. However,...

Using plant level panel data on Korean manufacturing during the 1990-98 period, this study tries to assess the role of entry and exit in enhancing aggregate productivity, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The main findings of this study are summarised as follows. First, plant entry and exit...

Price setting has become more flexible following a string of large adverse shocks (Covid-19, the Ukraine War). We argue that a shift to a high-uncertainty regime incentivizes firms to invest in their ability to adjust prices. We formalize this idea in a general equilibrium model with endogenous...