Using micro data from the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey and Current Population Survey, I document that government spending shocks affect individuals differently over the life cycle. Young households increase their consumption after an expansionary shock while prime-age households reduce it,...

Motivating with two scenarios in which the government spending in China timely reacted to output shock within a quarter, this letter points out a downward bias in the estimation of Chinese government spending multiplier using the classical lag restriction for shock identification in a quarterly...

The aim of this study is to determine the nature of the discretionary fiscal policy practiced by non-euro EU member states, namely to deduce some bias for one of the two types of fiscal policies - procyclical or countercyclical. For this purpose, we used time series for the period 1995-2020, of...

As part of Germany’s fiscal response to the Covid-19 pandemic, parents received three payments totalling e450 per child. Randomization in the payment dates and daily scanner data allow us to identify the effects of these transfers on household spending. We find a significant but small spending...

Since the outbreak of the Corona virus, policymakers around the globe introduced numerous emergency measures such as the wearing of masks, restrictions to mobility and travel and the shutdown of large parts of the economy, including firms, workplaces and schools. The implementation of...

Recent influential work argue that a gradual increase in the sales tax stimulates economic activity in a liquidity trap by boosting inflation expectations. Higher public infrastructure investment should also be more expansive in a liquidity trap than in normal times by raising the potential...

While the setting of the countercyclical capital buffer (CCyB) is not an automatic decision, insights from indicators, such as the credit-to-GDP gap, are a starting point to inform the policy decision. This paper identifies an optimal rule to map the credit-to-GDP gap adjusted to the guide to...

We investigate the implications of extra-normal government spending under COVID-19 for commercial bank lending growth between 2019Q4 and 2020Q4 in a sample of 3000 banks from 71 countries. We control for pre-pandemic structural factors, bank characteristics and government debt. To address the...

We investigate the implications of extra-normal government spending under the COVID-19 pandemic for commercial bank lending growth between 2019Q4 and 2020Q4 in a large sample of over 3000 banks from 71 countries. We control for pre-pandemic structural factors, bank characteristics and government...

This paper examines how European banks adjusted their lending subsequent to the release of the countercyclical capital buffers (CCyB) during the COVID-19 pandemic. At its onset in 2020Q1, being exposed to a higher ex-ante countercyclical capital buffer led to a reduction in banks' lending. Yet...

Expansions in public spending induce a surge in private consumption that is accompanied by increasing post-tax income of households. Endogenously reacting income, however, is insufficient to rationalize conditional comovement of private and public spending: household expenditures even expand in...

Despite a large body of empirical work analyzing the causal effects of fiscal stimulus on employment in developed countries, little evidence exists in developing economies and evidence from China is scarce. Using the initial share of local industries together with allocated spending announced in...

We simulate the fiscal stimulus packages set up by the German government to alleviate the costs of the COVID-19 pandemic in a dynamic New Keynesian multi-sector general equilibrium model. We find that, cumulated over 2020-2022, output losses relative to steady state can be reduced by more than 4...

In response to the record-breaking COVID19 recession, many governments have adopted unprecedented fiscal stimuli. While countercyclical fiscal policy is effective in fighting conventional recessions, little is known about the effectiveness of fiscal policy in the current environment with...

Would countercyclical fiscal policy during recessions improve or worsen the gender employment gap? We answer this question by exploring the state-dependent impact of fiscal spending shocks on employment by gender in the G-7 countries. Using the local projection method, we find that, during...

We exploit the unexpected announcement of an immediate, temporary VAT cut in Germany in the second half of 2020 as a natural experiment to study the spending response to unconventional fiscal policy. We use survey and scanner data on households' consumption expenditures and their perceived...

We simulate the fiscal stimulus packages set up by the German government to allevi-ate the costs of the COVID-19 pandemic in a dynamic New Keynesian multi-sectorgeneral equilibrium model. We find that, cumulated over 2020-2022, output lossesrelative to steady state can be reduced by more than 4...

In response to the record-breaking COVID19 recession, many governments have adopted unprecedented fiscal stimuli. While countercyclical fiscal policy is effective in fighting conventional recessions, little is known about the effectiveness of fiscal policy in the current environment with...

Debt-financed fiscal stimulus programmes directly stimulate aggregate demand through government expenditure or tax cuts, but their effectiveness is highly dependent on direct crowding out of private sector expenditure, spillover effects to the private sector through a higher risk premium on...

Almost all countries announced fiscal support programs once COVID-19 hit. However, there was significant diversity in the magnitude and composition of these fiscal stimulus programs. These differences were determined by myriad political, financial, social, and economic factors - these factors...

Die deutsche Schuldenbremse wird als Investitionsbremse kritisiert. Fraglich ist insbesondere, ob die Schuldenbremse bei konjunkturellen Schwankungen im Regelfall genügend Spielraum für eine antizyklische Kreditaufnahme lässt. Volkswirtschaftlich wichtige öffentliche Investitionen könnten...

Economies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) remain in crisis. The World Bank estimates the regional output to have contracted 3.8 percent in 2020 and expects it to rebound by only 2.2 percent in 2021. The regional output is expected to be 7.2% below where it would be in 2021 without the...

In HANK, we show that fiscal policy is an appropriate macroeconomic stabilization tool at the ZLB. Fiscal policy achieves the same macroeconomic aggregates and the same welfare as hypothetically unconstrained monetary policy by replicating its transmission mechanism. Consumption taxes and labor...

What are the quantitative macroeconomic effects of the countercyclical capital buffer (CCyB)? I study this question in a nonlinear DSGE model with occasional financial crises, which is calibrated and combined with US data to estimate sequences of structural shocks. Raising capital buffers during...

Recent influential work argue that a gradual increase in sales tax stimulates economic activityin a liquidity trap by boosting inflation expectations. Higher public infrastructure investmentshould also be more expansive in a liquidity trap than in normal times by raising the potentialinterest...