There is a significant controversy among academics and policy-makers about whether policies matter for economic growth. Recently, Acemoglu et al. (2003) and Easterly (2004) have presented empirical evidence against the commonly held view that policies play an important role in the process of...

Fiscal gap is an indicator of long run sustainability of government finance. It is used for assessment of the extent to which current fiscal policy is able to keep government budget solvent in the longer period. Fiscal gap is derived from intertemporal budget constraint which connects flows of...

Should rational agents take into consideration government policy announcements? A skilled agent (an econometrician) could set up a model to combine the following two pieces of information in order to anticipate the future course of fiscal policy in real-time: (i) the ex-ante path of policy as...

Motivated the European debt crisis, we construct a tractable theory of sovereign debt and structural reforms under limited commitment. The government of a sovereign country which has fallen into a recession of an uncertain duration issues one-period debt and can renege on its obligations by...

Despite intense scrutiny estimates of the government spending multiplier remain highly uncertain with values ranging from 0.5 to 2. While a fiscal consolidation is generally assumed to have the same (mirror-image) effect as a fiscal expansion, we show that relaxing this assumption is crucial to...

We use the time series of shifts in U.S. Federal tax liabilities constructed by Romer and Romer to estimate tax multipliers. Differently from the single-equation approach adopted by Romer and Romer, our estimation strategy (a Var that includes output, government spending and revenues, inflation...

This paper estimates the dynamic effects of changes in taxes in the United States. We distinguish between the effects of changes in personal and corporate income taxes using a new narrative account of federal tax liability changes in these two tax components. We develop an estimator in which...

This paper deals with 2008-2009 crisis which marked a new stage of Russia’s budgetary policy. Although the budget situation in Russia is presently much better than in the majority of the developed countries, reservation of high dependence on oil proceeds, observed trends in in the structure of...

This paper surveys the evolution of macroeconomic policy, in the New Zealand context, from the beginning of the end of the Great Inflation of the 1970s/1980s, through to the current recovery from the Great Recession brought on by the Global Financial Crisis. The 30 or so years since the late...