Recent fiscal policies have aimed to stimulate household spending. In 2008, most households received one-time economic stimulus payments. In 2009, most working households received the Making Work Pay tax credit in the form of reduced withholding; other households, mainly retirees, received...

The empirical literature using vector autoregressive models to assess the effects of fiscal policy shocks strongly disagrees on even the qualitative response of key macroeconomic variables to government spending and tax shocks. We provide new evidence for the U.S. over the period 1955-2006. We...

This paper looks at the impact of discretionary fiscal policy on economic growth for a sample of 18 EU countries over the period 1998-2011. The main novelty of this paper is the use, on the revenue side, of a dataset of fiscal measures based on the yield of actual legislative and budgetary...