We investigate whether the macroeconomic effects of government spending shocks vary with the level of uncertainty. Using postwar US data and a Self-Exciting Interacted VAR (SEIVAR) model, we find that fiscal spending has positive output effects in tranquil times but is contractionary during...

In many economic models a central variable of interest is lifetime or permanent income which is not observed in survey data sets and typically proxied by annual income information. To assess the quality of such approximations, we use a unique source of lifetime earnings - the German pension...

Traditional specifications of export equations incorporate foreign demand as a demand pull factor and the real exchange rate as a relative price variable. However, such standard export equations have failed to explain the export performance of euro area countries during the crisis period. In...

This paper identifies and measures fiscal spillovers in the EU countries empirically using a global vector autoregression (GVAR) model. Our aim is to look at the sign and the absolute values of fiscal spillovers in a country-wise perspective and at the time profile (impulse response) of the...

Traditional specifications of export equations incorporate foreign demand as a demand pull factor and the real exchange rate as a relative price variable. However, such standard export equations have failed to explain the export performance of euro area countries during the crisis period. In...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), as well as combinations thereof, are widely applied in incentive regulation practice, where the assessment of efficiency plays a major role in regulation design and benchmarking. Using a Monte Carlo simulation experiment,...

In many economic models a central variable of interest is lifetime or permanent income which is not observed in survey data sets and typically proxied by annual income information. To assess the quality of such approximations, we use a unique source of lifetime earnings – the German pension...

It is widely assumed that a common currency makes it desirable to have also a common fiscal policy. However, if fiscal policy is a source of shocks, independent national fiscal policies are generally preferable because they allow for risk diversification.

We develop a roadmap of how the ECB should further reduce the volume of money (money supply) and roll back credit easing in order to prevent inflation. The exits should be step-by-step rather than one-off . Communicating about the exit strategy must be an integral part of the exit strategy....

The ECB has accepted increasing amounts of rubbish collateral since the crisis started leading to exposure to serious private sector credit risk (i.e. default risk) on its collateralised lending and reverse operations ('repo'). This has led some commentators to argue that the ECB needs 'fiscal...