Source Themes

The Credit Channel of Public Procurement

Public procurement accounts for one-third of government spending. In this paper, I document a new mechanism through which government procurement promotes firm growth: firms use procurement contracts to increase cash flow based lending. I use …

Gains from Commitment: The Case for Pegging the Exchange Rate

This paper argues that the exchange rate regime matters for inflation and economic activity, with substantial benefits arising from a currency peg. At the heart of these benefits lies an increase in credibility that reduces the inflationary bias once …

Adopting the Euro: A Synthetic Control Approach

We investigate whether joining the European Monetary Union and losing the ability to set monetary policy affected the economic growth of Eurozone countries. We use the synthetic control approach to create a counterfactual scenario for how each …

The Full, Persistent, and Symmetric Pass-Through of a Temporary VAT Cut

We investigate the pass-through of a temporary value-added tax (VAT) cut on selected food products to consumer prices. Exploiting a novel dataset of daily online prices, we find that the VAT cut was fully transmitted to consumer prices, persisted …

The Political Costs of Austerity

Using a novel regional database covering over 200 elections in several European countries, this paper provides new empirical evidence on the political consequences of fiscal consolidations. To identify exogenous reductions in regional public …

Monetary Policy and the Wage Inflation-Unemployment Tradeoff

Using newly assembled data for 18 advanced economies between 1870 and 2019, I study how monetary policy affects wage inflation and unemployment and document two key findings regarding their tradeoff. First, the wage Phillips curve displays a …

The Effects of Government Spending in the Eurozone

Using a newly assembled rich dataset at the regional level, this paper provides novel empirical evidence on the fiscal transmission mechanism in the Eurozone. Our baseline estimates reveal a government spending relative output multiplier around 2, an …

Who should you vote for? Empirical evidence from Portuguese local governments

The economic literature considers voters quasi-rational agents that care about maximizing their individual welfare when deciding on who to vote for. Voters believe that, once a politician is elected, his or her characteristics will affect policy …