This paper first reviews a number of stylised facts concerning OECD country business cycles over the past four decades. In general, the amplitude of business cycles has fallen, driven mainly by declining fluctuations of domestic demand. As a result, international divergencies of cyclical...

Most of the focus of recent stabilization policy research and practice has been on monetary rather than fiscal policy. This paper explores how, given the limits on monetary policy, fiscal policy could play a larger role. It explores the use of quasi-automatic stabilizers, i.e. changes in taxes...

This paper proposes an approach to assess the extent of automatic fiscal stabilisation of aggregate household disposable income after a specific shock. The approach is based on the national account identity of household disposable income and elements of the OECD methodology to cyclically adjust...

We study optimal monetary policy in a general equilibrium economy with heterogeneous agents and nominal rigidities. Households differ in type-specific, state-contingent labor productivity and initial firm ownership, yet markets are complete. The fiscal authority has access to a linear tax...

An impulse response is the dynamic average effect of an intervention across horizons. We use the well-known Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to explore a response's heterogeneity over time and over states of the economy. This can be implemented with a simple extension to the usual local...