This paper defines economic slumps as sequences of structural breaks exhibiting a specific pattern. We identify 58 such episodes between 1950 and 2008 among 138 countries, and then examine the phases of decline and their duration. In some countries declines last extremely long, and we put...

Understanding how price regulations affect the adoption of new patent-protected pharmaceutical technologies is a crucial question in designing health systems. This paper addresses this question by examining how price expectations shape the probability of launch, controlling for competition,...

The extent of government deficits and debt has been one of the most debated issues in recent years. However, much less has been contributed about their dynamics. Yet, the issue of entering into and exiting from excessive deficits is critical in the Economic and Monetary Union since the Stability...

Long-term unemployment reached unprecedented levels in Spain in the wake of the Great Recession and it still affects around 57% of the unemployed. We document the sources that contributed to the rise in long-term unemployment and analyze its persistence using state-of-the-art duration models. We...

We analyse a card payment system to assess the economic impact of the interchange fee. This fee is paid by the bank of the merchant, the acquirer, to the bank of the consumer, the issuer. We build up a mode in order to explore whether the interchange fee can enhance the participation to the...

We examine the ability of policymakers to stimulate household borrowing and spending during the Great Recession by reducing banks' cost of funds. Using panel data on 8.5 million U.S. credit card accounts and 743 credit limit regression discontinuities, we estimate the marginal propensity to...

In framework of Rochet and Tirole (2011), I allow for partial merchant internalization and study how MIT threshold is related to levels of inter-change fee that maximize various components of social welfare. I find that cost absorption on the side of issuers and merchant heterogeneity each bias...

In this survey, we review the quantitative macroeconomic literature analyzing consumer debt and default. We start by providing an overview of consumer bankruptcy law in the US and document the relevant institutional changes over time. We proceed with a comprehensive empirical section, describing...

This paper introduces a novel monthly consumption indicator: the IZA / Fable Data consumption indicator for Germany. It is based on credit card transactions data collected and anonymised by Fable Data from 2017 onwards. We study some of the properties of the data and use a so-called ”one year...

We examine whether economic and military competence of political leaders affect their duration in office. We introduce leader heterogeneity in the selectorate theory of Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) and derive the hypothesis that in the presence of a revolutionary threat, economic competence...