We analyze how investment subsidies can affect aggregate volatility and growth in economies subject to capital market imperfections. Within a model featuring both frictions on the credit market and unequal access to investment opportunities among individuals, we provide specific fiscal...

Cross-country evidence on inflation and inequality suggests that they are positively correlated. I explore the hypothesis that this correlation is the outcome of a distributional conflict underlying the determination of fiscal policy.

We investigate the effects of fiscal policy surprises for US data, using vector autoregressions. We overcome the difficulties that changes in fiscal policy may manifest themselves in variables other than fiscal variables first and that fiscal variables may respond ‘automatically’ to business...

In a seminal contribution, Romer and Romer (2010) introduce a new dataset of exogenous tax changes and estimate a tax multiplier at 3 years of about -3. These results have been criticized as implausibly large. In this paper, I argue that on theoretical grounds the discretionary component of...

After the Global Financial Crisis a controversial rush to fiscal austerity followed in many countries. Yet research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates was and still is unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This paper...