The German federal government is facing criticism for using the exemption from the national debt brake due to the coronavirus crisis to expand the fiscal leeway for its future energy and climate policies. The budget dispute is taking place against the backdrop of a massive expansion of...

The paper deals with the current budget crisis in Germany, which was triggered by an attempt to increase public debt beyond the limits of the German constitution. The rejection of the Supplementary Budget 2021 of the federal government by the Constitutional Court in November 2023 requires a...

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...

We use responses to survey questions in the 2010 Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth that ask consumers how much of an unexpected transitory income change they would consume. We find that the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is 48 percent on average, and that there is substantial...

This paper analyses the determinants of public expenditures allocated to investment. We perform welfare analysis in an overlapping generations model with public consumption, public investment, debt and taxes. The optimal public investment share depends positively on the productive contribution...