This paper discusses the development of public expenditure in the Netherlands since 1850. Why did public expenditure increase from 14% GDP in 1850, nearly 20% in 1921, 30% GDP in 1950 and over 60% GDP in 1983? Dutch public expenditure has fallen to less than 50% GDP in 2003. Why did this...

This paper explores different fiscal stimuli within a business cycle model with an endogenous mass of firms which we estimate for the U.S. economy using Bayesian techniques. We demonstrate that a changing mass of firms is a crucial dimension for evaluating fiscal policy since it can both...

The traditional approach towards analyzing the impact of public investment has been through including public capital as a third input factor in a Solow-model production function. Nonetheless, such approach implies several problems both at the theoretical and empirical level. Given such problems,...

In the aftermath of a crisis which has now been lasting for more than five years, the debate about the size of fiscal multipliers arouse. Whatever the estimation approach, fiscal multipliers assumed for projections are the result of extrapolations from time series data. The present contribution...

This paper provides novel evidence on the time varying impact of government spending shocks on output in Germany over the years 1970 to 2013. In a first step, I use an expectations-augmented vector autoregressive model with time varying parameters (TVP-VAR) to show that fiscal multipliers are...

The aim of this study is to develop a new framework (V-L-D) for detecting the short term vulnerabilities in fiscal policy for the European Union countries. The methodology relies ontwo distinct indicators: one showing the vulnerabilities signalled by the size of the cyclically adjusted budget...

The purpose of this study is to check the Ricardian Equivalence Hypothesis in case of Pakistan by using annual data for the period of 1973-2009. Government expenditure, private consumption expenditure, tax revenue, government debt, disposable income, government budget deficit and wealth are the...

Rapidly rising deficits at both the federal and state and local government levels, along with long-term financing problems in the Social Security and Medicare programs, have triggered a one-sided austerity-focused class war in the US. Similar class conflicts have broken out around the globe. A...

As it also happened in many Latin American countries during the 60s and 70s, inflation became one of the main economic problems in the Brazilian economy. The acceleration of prices and hyperinflation coexisted not only with periods of economic expansion (1956-1979), but also with huge...

Fiscal stimuli to recover? A cascade of academic and layman-articles debate the effectiveness of fiscal policy in stimulating the economy backed up by different economic models and empirical support. This essay surveys the theoretical predictions and recent empirical Vector Autoregression (VAR)...