Who benefits from the evasion of value added taxes (VAT)? Using a reform that enforced VAT on previously non-compliant large retailers in Armenia, we estimate a onethird passthrough of the tax burden on prices. This suggests that pre-enforcement evasion rents were broadly shared with consumers...

What are the effects of austerity on distributional policy? We exploit the autonomy of Italian municipalities in setting non-linear income taxes and the exogenous introduction of a fiscal rule to show that austerity increases income tax progressivity. Consistent with this evidence, we find that...

Broker-dealer leverage has recently proven to be strongly procyclical, exhibiting impressive explanatory power for a large cross-section of asset returns in the US. In this paper we add empirical evidence to this finding, showing that European and German broker-dealers actively manage their...

After hitting the lower bound on interest rates, the Eurosystem engaged in a public sector purchase programme (PSPP) and forward guidance (FG). We use prior and posterior predictive analysis to evaluate the importance of parameter uncertainty in an analysis of these policies. We model FG as an...

We investigate the e ect of monetary policy on European macroeconomic variables using a small-scale vector autoregression (VAR) and the "Effective Monetary Stimulus" (EMS). The EMS is a monetary policy metric obtained from yield curve data that is designed to consistently reflect the overall...