The literature on shock-responsive social protection focuses on operational features that improve the speed and reach of the response, but little is known about the optimal design of emergency social protection responses in terms of which programs to use, information about the people affected,...

Do discretionary spending cuts and tax increases hurt social well-being? To answer this question, we combine subjective well-being data covering over half a million of individuals across 13 European countries, with macroeconomic data on fiscal consolidations. We find that fiscal consolidations...

This paper studies the transmission of a foreign fiscal policy shock (assumed to be generated in Germany) to key macroeconomic variables in five Central and Eastern European economies (CEE-5). We use quarterly data from 1995 to 2009 and estimate an open economy structural vector autoregressive...

An impulse response is the dynamic average effect of an intervention across horizons. We use the well-known Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to explore a response's heterogeneity over time and over states of the economy. This can be implemented with a simple extension to the usual local...

We propose a new approach to analyze economic shocks. Our new procedure identifies economic shocks as exogenous shifts in a function; hence, we call them "functional shocks." We show how to identify such shocks and how to trace their effects in the economy via VARs using "VARs with functional...

The study evaluates the effectiveness of Iranian government subsidies for households by comparing the welfare impact of food price shocks with the subsidy payments they receive. This helps us assess the government's efforts to reduce poverty in Iran. The household income and expenditure survey...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of the tax and transfer systems in the European Union and the US to act as an automatic stabilizer in the current economic crisis. We find that automatic stabilizers absorb 38 per cent of a proportional income shock in the EU, compared to 32 per cent in the...

This paper investigates the relationship between the magnitude of automatic stabilizers in the tax and transfer systems of 19 EU countries and the US, and discretionary fiscal stimulus packages passed by these countries during the recent economic crisis. In particular, we ask whether countries...

This paper examines the impact of the 2003-05 oil price increase on the balance of payments positions and IMF financing needs of low-income country oil importers. It finds that stronger exports reflecting favorable global conditions, a compression of oil import volumes due to the pass-through of...