The German debt brake is often regarded as a great success story, and has therefore served as a role model for the Euro area and its fiscal compact. In this paper we fundamentally criticize the debt brake. We show that (1) it suffers from serious shortcomings, and its success is far from certain...

In a standard linear structural VAR framework we analyse the size and sign of fiscal multipliers in the euro area, using a newly available quarterly dataset of fiscal variables for the period 1981-2007. From a policy perspective, the analysis of fiscal multipliers in “average times” provides...