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...

The literature on the government spending multiplier has implicitly assumed that an increase in government spending has the same (mirror-image) effect as a decrease in government spending. We show that relaxing this assumption is important to understand the effects of fiscal policy. Regardless...