What are the cyclical properties of US state and local government fiscal policy? The budget surplus of local and, in particular, state governments is procyclical, smoothing disposable income and consumption of state residents. This happens over both short- and medium-term horizons. Procyclical...

We investigate the effects of fiscal policy surprises for US data, using vector autoregressions. We overcome the difficulties that changes in fiscal policy may manifest themselves in variables other than fiscal variables first and that fiscal variables may respond ‘automatically’ to business...

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...

Between 2007 and 2009, government expenditures increased rapidly across the OECD countries. While economic research on the impact of government purchases has flourished, in the data, about three quarters of the increase in expenditures in the United States (and more in other countries) was in...

This paper investigates the desirability of international fiscal policy coordination in the presence of a domestic political distortion. The domestic distortion results from the inability of the current policy-maker to enter into a binding agreement with future policy-makers about the...

This paper studies, in a model with unemployment, how labour market status affects the preferences for public spending, in the form of a public good or subsidies. It then derives the implications for the dynamics of government expenditures under the hypothesis of majority voting. These will...

We propose a general theory that explains the extent of the state and accounts for related institutions as byproducts of the state's extractive technology. We posit further that this extractive technology is determined by the transparency of the production technology. This theory is applied to...

This paper demonstrates the effects of ethnic and religious diversity on the quality of public spaces. Its identification strategy relies on the exogeneity of public housing allocations in France, and thereby eliminates the bias from endogenous sorting. The paper uses micro evidence of social...

We study how the prevailing internal organization of the family affected the initial design of pension systems. Our theoretical framework predicts that, in society with weak family ties, pensions systems were introduced to act as a safety net, while in societies with strong ties they replicate...

This paper studies the endogenous emergence of political regimes in societies in which productive resources are distributed unequally and institutions do not ensure political commitments. The results imply that for any level of development there exists a distribution of resources such that...