We study the effects on financial markets and real economic activity of changes in risk related to political events and policy announcements in Italy during the 2013-2019 period that saw the rise to power of populist parties. We focus on events that have implications for budgetary policy, debt...

We analyze how the combined effect of automatic stabilizers and discretionary changes in tax-benefit systems have affected the cushioning of income shocks in the Euro zone and the EU-27 in the period 2007-2014. We propose a new summary measure of the combined effect of automatic stabilizers and...

This paper investigates how the concept of public purpose is used in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). As a common denominator among political scientists, the idea of public purpose is that economic actions should aim at benefiting the majority of the society. However, the concept is to be...

We provide an interesting empirical evidence dealing with the cross country data on equality i.e. movements of Gini coefficient over last four decades. This seems to suggest a robust empirical evidence that the growth or change in inequality across nations has a negative relation with initial...

We study the incidence and severity of lower-bound episodes and the efficacy of three types of state-dependent policies - forward guidance about the future path of interest rates, large-scale asset purchases and spending-based fiscal stimulus - in ameliorating the adverse consequences stemming...

This paper studies the role of wealth effects in the monetary transmission mechanism in New Keynesian models. We propose a decomposition of consumption that extends the Slutsky equation to a general equilibrium setting. Wealth effects, and their amplification in general equilibrium, explain a...

The main problem facing policymakers during the corona virus pandemic is how to mitigate its humanitarian and economic costs. Doing so invariably involves trading off some costs against others as well as short-term against longer-term consequences. We provide an overview of economic literature...

Large-scale business subsidies tied to national industrial development promotion programmes are notoriously difficult to study and are often inseparable from the political economy of large government programmes. We use the Tunisian national firm registry panel database, data on treated firms,...

We assess the long-run growth effects of automation in the overlapping generations framework. Although automation implies constant returns to capital and, thus, an AK production side of the economy, positive long-run growth does not emerge. The reason is that automation suppresses wage income,...

In light of the current low-interest-rate environment, we reconsider the merit of a money growth target (MGT) relative to a conventional in ation targeting (IT) regime, and to the notion of price level targeting (PLT). Through the lens of a New Keynesian model, and accounting for a zero lower...

Using a large-scale survey of U.S. households during the Covid-19 pandemic, we study how new information about fiscal and monetary policy responses to the crisis affects households' expectations. We provide random subsets of participants in the Nielsen Homescan panel with different combinations...

We provide evidence that expansionary fiscal policy lowers the return difference between more and less liquid assets—the liquidity premium. We rationalize this finding in an estimated heterogeneous-agent New-Keynesian (HANK) model with incomplete markets and portfolio choice, in which public...

As the coronavirus pandemic spread across the globe in early 2020, the European Central Bank as well as national governments in the euro area enacted or announced numerous economic policy measures to counteract the severe economic consequences of the resulting lockdowns. In this paper, the...

A two-sector incomplete markets model with heterogeneous agents can be used to study the distributional effects of the COVID-19 lockdown. While negative aggregate welfare effects of the lockdown are unavoidable, the size of aggregate welfare effects as well as the distribution of the welfare...

We investigate state-dependent effects of fiscal multipliers and allow for endogenous sample splitting to determine whether the US economy is in a slack state. When the endogenized slack state is estimated as the period of the unemployment rate higher than about 12 percent, the estimated...

Using a large-scale survey of U.S. households during the Covid-19 pandemic, we study how new information about fiscal and monetary policy responses to the crisis affects households' expectations. We provide random subsets of participants in the Nielsen Homescan panel with different combinations...

This paper provides evidence on the effect of fiscal stimulus on economic activity in countries with different degrees of institutional quality. The identification strategy makes use of data on military expenditure to instrument government consumption using local lineal projections as presented...

In this paper, sound public finances under the euro means sustainability in the long term instead of short- and medium-term fiscal discipline. The challenges to sustainability are identified for the four largest euro area member states, and several policy options for sustainability are...

We study the incidence and severity of lower-bound episodes and the efficacy of three types of state-dependent policies - forward guidance about the future path of interest rates, large-scale asset purchases and spending-based fiscal stimulus - in ameliorating the adverse consequences stemming...

The likely substantial impact of Covid-19 related measures on the public finances of European countries has prompted an unprecedented call for new and significant policies at a European level to alleviate the pressures on individual member states. The administrative closures adopted across a...

This paper provides a technical description of the overlapping generations model used by the Joint Research Centre to analyse tax policy reforms, including in particular pension and demographic issues. The main feature of the EDGE-M3 model lies in its high level of disaggregation and the close...

Despite the frequent use of fiscal policy for stabilization purposes and the important role fiscal activism has played over the last decade, the size of budgetary multipliers (i.e. the output response following an exogenous shock to fiscal policy) has been heatedly debated at the theoretical and...

Much of the research on fiscal multipliers has used reduced form modelling approaches. While these models have been extended to include richer controls and identification approaches, it remains unclear whether shocks identified capture the true structural shocks. An alternative way to identify...

How large are government spending and tax multipliers? The fiscal proxy-SVAR literature provides heterogenous estimates, depending on which proxies - fiscal or non-fiscal - are used to identify fiscal shocks. We reconcile the existing estimates via a flexible vector autoregressive model that...

COVID-19 has quickly emerged as a novel risk, generating feverish behavior among investors, and posing unprecedented challenges for policymakers. The empirical analysis provides evidence for a significant negative effect on stock markets of COVID-19-related measures announced in the Euro Area...

How large are government spending and tax multipliers? The fiscal proxy-SVAR literature provides heterogenous estimates, depending on which proxies - fiscal or non-fiscal - are used to identify fiscal shocks. We reconcile the existing estimates via a flexible vector autoregressive model that...

I study liquidity traps in a model where agents have heterogeneous expectations and finite planning horizons. Backward-looking agents base their expectations on past observations, while forward-looking agents have fully rational expectations. Liquidity traps that are fully or partly driven by...

I study the effects of the 2019-20 coronavirus outbreak in the United States and subsequent fiscal policy response in a nonlinear DSGE model. The pandemic is a shock to the utility of contact-intensive services that propagates to other sectors via general equilibrium, triggering a deep...

This paper studies the design of the policy mix in a monetary union, that is, the institutional arrangement specifying the relationships between the various policymakers present in the union and the extent of their capacity of action. It is assumed that policymakers do not cooperate. Detailing...

We study the yield curve control in Eurozone. We apply Chen, Cúrdia and Ferrero (2012) model that uses a financial friction to break Wallace's neutrality. We calibrate a bond supply shock that corresponds to the observed change in the time premium in euro area when the APP program was...

In order to fight the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, monetary and fiscal policy announced a large variety of support packages which are often unprecedented in size. In this paper, we provide an empirical analysis of the responses of European financial markets to these policy...

Using a large-scale survey of U.S. consumers, we study how the large one-time transfers to individuals from the CARES Act affected their consumption, saving and labor-supply decisions. Most respondents report that they primarily saved or paid down debts with their transfers, with only about 15...

How large are government spending and tax multipliers? The fiscal proxy-SVAR literature provides heterogenous estimates, depending on which proxies - fiscal or non-fiscal - are used to identify fiscal shocks. We reconcile the existing estimates via a flexible vector autoregressive model that...