A popular view among economists, policy-makers, and the media, is that the Maastricht Treaty and then Stability and Growth Pact have significantly impaired the ability of EU governments to conduct a stabilizing fiscal policy and to provide an adequate level of public infrastructure. In this...

As governments around the world contemplate slashing budget deficits, the "expansionary fiscal consolidation hypothesis" is back in vogue. I argue that, as a statement about the short run, it should be taken with caution. Alesina and Perotti (1995) and Alesina and Ardagna (2010) (AAP) show that...

Does it matter, for the size of the government spending multiplier, which category of agents bears the brunt of the necessary adjustment in taxes? In an economy with heterogeneous agents and imperfect financial markets, the answer depends on whether or not New Keynesian features, such are price...

We document that an increase in government purchases generates a rise in consumption, the real and the product wage, and a fall in the markup. This evidence is robust across alternative empirical methodologies used to identify innovations in government spending (structural VAR vs. narrative...

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...

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...

In this paper, we study the link between profitability, fiscal policy and exchange rate regimes. We are particularly interested in adding realism to the treatment of fiscal policy by looking explicitly at its individual components. We show that the different types of government spending and...

Government spending at the zero lower bound (ZLB) is not necessarily welfare enhancing, even when its output multiplier is large. When government spending provides direct utility to the household, its optimal level is at most 0.5-1 percent of GDP for recessions of -4 percent; the numbers are...