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...

A central tenet of the Maastricht Treaty is that a successful European Monetary Union requires sustainable public finances of its member states. Yet there is no clear definition of sustainability. The economist’s common use of the term builds on the concept of an intertemporal budget...

Under free capital mobility, confidence crises can lead to devaluations even when fixed exchange rates are viable, if fiscal authorities can obtain temporary money financing of deficits. During a crisis domestic interest rates increase, reflecting the expected devaluation. Rather than selling...

In an economy with financial imperfections, Ricardian equivalence holds when prices are flexible and the steady-state distribution of consumption is uniform, or labor is inelastic. With different steady-state consumption levels, Ricardian equivalence fails, but tax cuts, somewhat paradoxically,...

Latin America is volatile--about two to three times as volatile as the industrial economies. It is more volatile than any region other than Africa and the Middle East. Latin America's access to international financial markets is sporadic, and often disappears just when it would be most valuable.

This paper evaluates the effects of fiscal policy on investment using a panel of OECD countries. In particular, we investigate how different types of fiscal policy affect profits and, as a result, investment. We find a sizeable negative effect of public spending - and in particular of its public...

We estimate the effects of fiscal policy on the labor market in US data. An increase in government spending of 1 percent of GDP generates output and unemployment multipliers respectively of about 1.2 per cent (at one year) and 0.6 percentage points (at the peak). Each percentage point increase...

This Paper studies the effects of fiscal policy on GDP, inflation and interest rates in five OECD countries, using a structural Vector Autoregression approach. Its main results can be summarized as follows: 1) The effects of fiscal policy on GDP tend to be small: government spending multipliers...

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...

Several recent studies imply that the response of national saving to fiscal policy is non-monotonic. In this paper, we use two data sets to search for the circumstances in which such non-monotonic responses arise: one refers to a sample of OECD countries, as in previous studies, and one to a...