We empirically assess whether a usually expected negative response of private consumption and private investment to a fiscal consolidation is reversed. We focus on a large sample of 174 countries between 1970 and 2018. We also employ three alternative measures of the Cyclically Adjusted Primary...

Using financial statement data from the Thomson Reuter's Worldscope database for 22,333 non-financial firms in 52 advanced and emerging economies, this paper examines how fiscal stimulus (i.e., changes in structural deficit) interacted with sectoral business cycle sensitivity affected corporate...

This paper provides new insights about the existence of expansionary fiscal consolidations in the Economic and Monetary Union, using annual panel data for 14 European Union countries over the period 1970-2012. Different measures for assessing fiscal consolidations based on the changes in the...

We empirically assess whether a usually expected negative response of private consumption and private investment to a fiscal consolidation is reversed. We focus on a large sample of 174 countries between 1970 and 2018. We also employ three alternative measures of the Cyclically Adjusted Primary...

Foreign aid is a sizable source of government financing for several developing countries and its allocation matters for the conduct of fiscal policy. This paper revisits fiscal effects of shifts in aid dependency in 59 developing countries from 1960 to 2010. It identifies structural shifts in...

We consider a new method to estimate causal effects when a treated unit suffers a shock or an intervention, such as a policy change, but there is not a readily available control group or counterfactual. We propose a two-step approach where in the first stage an artificial counterfactual is...

Recently, there has been a growing interest in developing econometric tools to conduct counterfactual analysis with aggregate data when a "treated" unit suffers an intervention, such as a policy change, and there is no obvious control group. Usually, the proposed methods are based on the...

Recent studies have used a distributional analysis of welfare reform experiments suggesting that some individuals reduce hours in order to opt into welfare, an example of behavioral-induced participation. Using data on Connecticut's Jobs First experiment, we find no evidence of...

Critics protest loudly against restrictions imposed by politicians during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany: Mandatory masks, lockdowns, school and business closures. This paper examines (1) the extent to which these policies have indirectly contributed to limiting the number of COVID-19 cases...

This paper assesses the impact of pegging the CFA franc to the euro - at a fixed parity - on real GDP per capita in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) and the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CAEMC) countries. Using a set of 35 annual country-level panel data...