Most economists would agree that a hike in the federal funds rate will cause some slowdown in growth and inflation, and that the bulk of the empirical evidence is consistent with this statement. But perfectly reasonable economists can and do disagree even on the basic effects of a shock to...

The Greek crisis was the most severe in postwar Europe; its budget cuts were the deepest. Among the components of the budget, health spending was hit particularly hard, declining by more than one third in just five years. This paper has two goals: establish the facts about health inputs, outputs...

Criticism of the Target system by a group of central European scholars has become a widespread argument against the policies of the European Central Bank and even the integrity of the monetary union, and even standard fare in the media and in the political debate in Germany. Most academics and...

Impulse responses to government spending shocks in Standard Vector Autoregressions (SVARs) typically display "expansionary" features. However, SVARs can be subject to a "non-fundamentalness" problem. "Expectations - Augmented" VARs (EVARs), which use direct measures of forecasts of defense...