The paper compares the boom-and-bust cycles in Japan and Europe with respect to the reasons for excessive booms, the characteristics of the crises, and the (potential) effects of the crisis therapies. As in Japan the consequence of expansionary monetary and fiscal policies is the hysteresis of...

Output gaps (OG) identify economic cycles and the cyclical and structural components in government budget balances. A new simple method for estimating OGs is presented here. The new results are more transparent than those published by the leading economic policy institutions. - The retroactive...

We estimate government spending multipliers in demand- and supply-driven recessions for the Euro Area. Multipliers in a moderately demand-driven recession are 2-3 times larger than in a moderately supply-driven recession, with the difference between multipliers being non-zero with very high...

How much does inequality matter for the business cycle and vice versa? Using a Bayesian likelihood approach, we estimate a heterogeneous-agent New-Keynesian (HANK) model with incomplete markets and portfolio choice between liquid and illiquid assets. The model enlarges the set of shocks and...

In the Great Recession most OECD countries used short-time work (publicly subsidized working time reductions) to counteract a steep increase in unemployment. We show that short-time work can actually save jobs. However, there is an important distinction to be made: While the rule-based component...

The highly dynamic nature of the COVID-19 crisis poses an unprecedented challenge to policy makers around the world to take appropriate income-stabilizing countermeasures. To properly design such policy measures, it is important to quantify their effects in real-time. However, data on the...

This paper studies optimal macroeconomic policy when nonlinearity in the business cycle is described by a vector smooth transition autoregression (VSTAR). A structural identification of the VSTAR that yields a low-dimension and certainty-equivalent nonlinear quadratic regulator (NLQR) problem is...

Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We...

We employ a parsimonious nonlinear Interacted-VAR to examine whether the real effects of uncertainty shocks are greater when the economy is at the ZeroLower Bound. We find the contractionary effects of uncertainty shocks to be statistically larger when the ZLB is binding, with differences that...