Using state-dependent local projection methods and historical U.S. data, we find that government spending multipliers are considerably larger in periods of private debt overhang. In particular, we find significant crowding-out of personal consumption and investment in low-debt states, resulting...

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This article describes a new Stata routine, xtbcfe, that performs the iterative bootstrap-based bias correction for the fixed effects (FE) estimator in dynamic panels proposed by Everaert and Pozzi (Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 2007). We first simplify the core of their algorithm...

In several OECD countries age-targeted wage subsidies have been introduced to increase the employment of older workers, but evidence on their effectiveness is scarce. This paper examines the effects of a permanent wage cost subsidy in Belgium on the employment rate, working time and hourly wage....

This paper analyzes the amount of time variation in the parameters of a reduced-form empirical macroeconomic model for the U.S. economy. We set up an unobserved components model to decompose output, inflation and unemployment in their stochastic trend and business cycle gap components. The...

We analyse the relationship between formal education and on-the-job skill acquisition (SA) for a sample of Flemish school-leavers. SA is measured directly through subjective assessments. Formal education is found to reinforce labour market inequality because additional years of education enhance...

This paper assesses the macroeconomic effects of unconventional monetary policy by estimating a panel VAR with monthly data from eight advanced economies over a sample spanning the period since the onset of the global ?nancial crisis. The results suggest that an exogenous increase in central...

I estimate the impact of different types of bank lending shocks on the euro area economy. I first show that the dynamic effects depend on the type of shock. Whereas surges in lending caused by shocks at the supply side of the banking market have a significant positive impact on economic activity...

We endow individuals that differ in skill levels and tastes for working with altruistic preferences for redistribution in a voting model where a unidimensional redistributive parameter is chosen by majority voting in a direct democracy. When altruistic preferences are desert-sensitive, i.e. when...

This paper documents a large cross-country variation in the relationship between bank competition and stability and explores market, regulatory and institutional features that can explain this heterogeneity. Combining insights from the competition-stability and regulation-stability literatures,...