This Paper studies empirically the effects of and the interactions amongst economic and political liberalizations. Economic liberalizations are measured by a widely used indicator that captures the scope of the market in the economy, and in particular of policies towards freer international...

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 shows how the richer frequency and variety of fiscal policy shocks available in an international sample can be analyzed recognizing the heterogeneity that exists across different countries. The main conclusion of our empirical analysis is that the question 'what is the fiscal policy...

We explore how fiscal policies in the OECD have responded to unexpected information about the economy during the period 1995-2006. In particular, we first estimate standard fiscal rules using ex-ante data (i.e. forecasts). We then estimate how fiscal policy reacts to new information, especially...

The currently available empirical evidence shows remarkable differences between various estimates of the effects on U.S. output of an exogenous shift in Federal tax liabilities. Shocks identified via the narrative method imply a multiplier of about three over an horizon of three years. Tax...

The paper presents evidence of an upward ratchet in transfers and taxes in the U.S. around World-War II. This finding is explained within a political-economy framework involving an executive who sets defense spending and the median voter in the population who interacts with a (richer) agenda...

A single variable describes, day-by-day, what investors think about the state of Brazil's economy: the Brazilian component of the Emerging Market Bond Index, the Embi spread. This spread is the difference between the yield on a dollar-denominated bond issued by the Brazilian government and a...

In earlier work we documented two episodes in which a sharp fiscal consolidation was associated with a surprisingly large expansion in private domestic demand. In this paper we draw on further evidence to investigate if and when fiscal policy changes can have such non-Keynesian effects. In the...

Data revisions and the availability of a longer sample offer the opportunity to reconsider the empirical findings that suggest that in the OECD countries national saving responds non-monotonically to fiscal policy. The paper confirms that the circumstance most likely to give rise to a...