This paper investigates empirically the effect of personal income tax progressivity on output volatility in a sample of OECD countries over the period 1982-2009. Our measure of tax progressivity is based on the difference between the marginal and the average income tax rate for the average...

This paper provides empirical evidence showing that smaller countries tend to have more volatile government spending for a sample of 160 countries from 1960 to 2000. We argue that the larger size of a country decreases the volatility of government spending because it acts as an insurance against...

This paper provides empirical evidence showing that smaller countries tend to have more volatile government spending for a sample of 160 countries from 1960 to 2000. We argue that the larger size of a country decreases the volatility of government spending because it acts as an insurance against...

This paper investigates empirically the effect of personal income tax progressivity on output volatility in a sample of OECD countries over the period 1982-2009. Our measure of tax progressivity is based on the difference between the marginal and the average income tax rate for the average...

We use inflation and income growth expectations from the ECB Consumer Expectations Survey to measure the subjective expected pass-through of inflation to income in the main euro area countries. By aggregating consumers' responses to probabilistic questions, we obtain significantly higher...

What are the drivers of business cycle fluctuations? And how many are there? By documenting strong and predictable co-movement of real variables during the business cycle in a sample of advanced economies, we argue that most business cycle fluctuations a re d riven b y o ne major factor. The...

The New Keynesian Phillips Curve is at the center of two raging empirical debates. First, how can purely forward looking pricing account for the observed persistence in aggregate inflation. Second, price-setting responds to movements in marginal costs, which should therefore be the driving force...

I show that the detrending of financial variables with the Hodrick and Prescott (1981, 1997) (HP) and band-pass filters leads to spurious cycles. I find that distortions become especially severe when considering medium-term cycles, i.e., cycles that exceed the duration of regular business...

We construct a growth model with an explicit government role, where more government resources reduce the optimal level of private consumption and of output per worker. In the empirical analysis, for a panel of 108 countries from 1970-2008, we use different proxies for government size and...

Using extreme value theory tools, we demonstrate that the distributions of the exchange market pressure (EMP) series for most of twelve emerging Europe countries have heavy tails, and disregarding their tail properties may lead to substantial underestimation of the probability of tail events....