We find that lottery tax windfalls finance higher state-government expenditures on supplemental security income that increase consumption, but only during bust periods. Wealth transfers from lottery winners to low income households enable fiscal policy to stabilize consumption during bust periods.

This paper investigates the effect of house price changes on household consumption. Regression results indicate a positive and significant housing wealth effect for the high income households being offset by a negative wealth effect of the low income household group.

We show that to account for the cross-sectional divergence in debt-to-income ratios in US data a DSGE model must assume a tax reallocation across the top- and bottom-income quantile of the population, rather than differential productivity growth, and low cost of access to financial intermediation.

Consumption falls counter-factually on impact for investment-specific technology shocks, which, recent literature suggests, are important drivers of business cycles. Introducing financial frictions and variable capacity utilization to the standard New-Keynesian setup can overturn this...

A weight-conservative central banker setting policy with discretion and stabilizing the real exchange-rate-adjusted (REX) price level and the output gap can replicate the behavior of the rate of REX inflation and the output gap under policy from a timeless perspective.

This paper tries to shed light on the historical analogies of the current crisis. To that end we compare the current sample distribution of Dow Jones Industrial Average Index returns for a 769-day period (from 15 September 2008, the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, to 30 September 2011), with all...

This paper examines the degree of fragmentation in the Euro overnight unsecured money market during the period June 2008–August 2013 using interbank loans constructed from payments data. After controlling for cross-country differences in bank risk, we document several episodes of significant...

We investigate the effect of central bank independence on stock market returns in emerging economies. We find evidence for a positive overall effect, but economic independence of the central bank appears to be more relevant than political independence.

This paper studies empirically the dynamic interactions between asset prices, monetary policy, and aggregate fluctuations in the U.S. during the Volcker–Greenspan period. Results from a simple structural vector autoregression indicate that monetary policy reacts directly to the term spread and...

This paper investigates the relationship between financial optimism and non-participation in pension schemes in the UK. We show that financial optimism reduces the probability of employees joining employer run pension schemes and also the probability of the self-employed subscribing to private...