This paper discusses a number of issues that the newly constituted Board of the ECB will face early on. We show how conducting a European monetary policy is very different from living under the protective umbrella of the Bundesbank. We discuss voting on the ECB Board and argue that the ability...

In earlier work we documented two episodes in which a sharp fiscal consolidation was associated with a very large expansions in private domestic demand. In this paper we draw on further evidence to investigate if and when fiscal policy changes can have such non-Keynesian effects. In the first...

Available studies on asymmetries in the monetary transmission mechanism within Europe are invariably based on macro-economic evidence: such evidence is abundant but often contradictory. This paper takes a different route by using micro-economic data. We use the information contained in the...

Several recent studies suggest that the response of national saving to fiscal policy may be non-linear. In this paper we use two data sets to search for the circumstances in which such non-linear responses may arise: a sample of OECD countries used in previous studies, and sample of developing...

Many students enrolled in academic programs around the world take longer to obtain a degree than the normal completion time while college tuition is typically constant during the years of enrollment. In particular, it does not increase when a student remains in a program beyond the normal...

A shift in taxes or in government spending (a "fiscal shock") at some point in time puts a constraint on the path of taxes and spending in the future, since the government intertemporal budget constraint will eventually have to be met. This simple fact is surprisingly overlooked in analyses of...

Despite the fact that the correlation between policy rates in the U.S. and in the euro area has been low—at least over the past three decades—long term interest rates in the two regions have been highly correlated. More recently (since the early 1990s) their levels have also...

The currently available empirical evidence shows remarkable differences between various estimates of the effects on U.S output of an exogenous shift in Federal tax liabilities. Shocks identified via the narrative method, imply a multiplier of about three over . an horizon of three years. Tax...

Financial systems are inherently fragile because of the very function which makes them valuable: liquidity transformation. Thus regulatory reforms, as urgent and desirable as they are, will definitely strengthen the financial system and decrease the risk of liquidity crises, but they will never...

The currently available empirical evidence shows remarkable differences between various estimates of the effects on U.S. output of an exogenous shift in Federal tax liabilities. Shocks identified via the narrative method imply a multiplier of about three over an horizon of three years. Tax...