The recent boom-bust cycle in the euro area's equity valuations has left nonfinancial corporations saddled with a legacy of high debt or leverage. Models of corporate investment behavior based on imperfect capital markets predict that highly leveraged balance sheets can act as a brake on...

This paper discusses the case for a money pillar in the European Central Bank's (ECB) monetary policy strategy. Time-series evidence for industrial countries based on frequency-domain and unobserved-components analysis suggests that money can play a useful role in gauging and constraining...

Boom and bust phases in asset prices have become a pervasive feature of macroeconomic developments in many advanced economies. This paper studies fiscal policy during boom-bust phases in asset prices and draws several conclusions. First, expansions and contractions in economic activity during...

Since the mid-seventies fiscal policy in many OECD countries has been faced with the problem of rapidly rising public debt. The dynamics of public debt can be traced to two factors: first, the spread between the interest rate and the growth rate of the economy, and second, the primary budget...

A push-pull-brake model of capital flows is used to study the effects of fiscal policy changes on private capital flows to emerging Europe during 2000-07. In the model, countercyclical fiscal policy has two opposing effects on capital inflows: (i) a conventional absorptionreducing effect, as a...

We examine the robustness of persistence measurement to different seasonal adjustment procedures. The empirical analysis is based on U.S. data for real gross national product (GNP). Officially published data on U.S. GNP are seasonally adjusted by Census X-11. We find that this series gives...

The spread between long-term and short-term interest rates is an excellent leading indicator of business-cycle fluctuations in Austria and Germany. A negative spread signals a slowdown in future growth; a positive spread indicates improved growth prospects. This finding may serve to...