Monetary policy can stimulate business investment in various ways, most directly by improving financing conditions. Despite the expansionary policy of the ECB, however, business investment in the euro area has not yet rebounded, following the strong...

We project the path of the public debt and primary surpluses for a number of countries in the euro area under a fiscal rule based on a set of estimated fiscal policy reaction functions. Our fiscal rule represents a fiscal analogue to a well-known...

We analyze the dynamics in the global crude oil market based on a structural vector autoregressive model. We identify the model by presuming that reduced form residuals can be traced back to structural shocks that are independently distributed over...

Beside a priori theoretical assumptions on instantaneous or long-run effects of structural shocks, sign restrictions have become a prominent means for structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) analysis. Moreover, changes in second order moments of...

The literature has not yet come to a consensus on the actual responses of fiscal policy to output and to past public debt levels within industrialized countries. While the cyclical adjustment literature has suggested a strong response of the primary...

Business investment in the euro area strongly declined during the Global Financial Crisis and the Sovereign Debt Crisis. It has not yet rebounded to its pre-crisis trend despite the very expansionary monetary policy measures of the ECB. We analyze...

We investigate the impact of errors in medium run tax revenue forecasts on the final budget balance. Our analysis is based on fiscal data for the entirety of German states and takes advantage of revenue forecasts and respective errors that can be...

We project the path of the public debt and primary surpluses for a number of countries in the euro area under a fiscal rule based on a set of estimated fiscal policy reaction functions. Our fiscal rule represents a fiscal analogue to a well-known...

The macroeconomic surveillance mechanism of the European Union, namely the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure (MIP), is based on the Scoreboard, which comprises of a set of indicators that serve as a signaling device for potentially harmful...

We formulate and estimate a simple fiscal policy reaction function for the euro area and individual euro area countries. Our reaction function allows for primary surpluses to feature three components: an anti-cyclical response of primary surpluses to...