While the established literature on central bank communication has traditionally dealt with communication of monetary policy messages to financial markets and the wider public, central bank communication on fiscal policy has so far received little attention. This paper empirically reviews the...

The issue of central bank communication on fiscal policy has so far received very little attention in the literature. This article aims to shed light on the determinants of central bank communication on fiscal policy by analysing the intensity of central banks’ fiscal communication for five...

This article looks at US$ and DM/Euro-denominated government bond spreads relative to US and German benchmark bonds before and after the start of the current financial crisis. The study finds, first, that bond yield spreads during the crisis can largely be explained on the basis of the same...

This paper analyses some fiscal aspects of mortgage debt in the EU. It first describes the main fiscal instruments that governments use to affect mortgage-financed home-ownership. In the empirical part, real mortgage debt growth is analysed for 15 EU countries using pooled regressions. Fiscal...

This paper examines the short- and long-run behavior of tax receipts with regard to their tax bases. In addition, the possibility of asymmetries in tax responses is explicitly included. The methodology is applied to the three main tax categories in the Netherlands for the period 1971-2005, after...

We investigate the importance of aggregate and consumer-specific or idiosyncratic labour income risk for aggregate consumption changes in the US over the period 1952-2001. Theoretically, the effect of labour income risk on consumption changes is decomposed into an aggregate and into an...

This paper examines the sources of stickiness in aggregate consumption growth. We first derive a dynamic consumption equation which encompasses many recent developments in consumption theory: habit formation, intertemporal substitution effects, consumption based on current income, and...

Micro data are used for the US over the period 1968 - 1992 to estimate time-varying specifications for the conditional variance of earnings of individual households. Specifications estimated are standard and quadratic ARCH and GARCH processes. The cross-sectional mean of the estimated...