An important, yet untested, prediction of many macro models with financial frictions is that financial market disruptions can have highly nonlinear effects on economic activity. This paper presents empirical evidence supporting this prediction, and in particular that financial shocks have...

Despite intense scrutiny estimates of the government spending multiplier remain highly uncertain with values ranging from 0.5 to 2. While a fiscal consolidation is generally assumed to have the same (mirror-image) effect as a fiscal expansion, we show that relaxing this assumption is crucial to...