The 'starving the beast' hypothesis claims that tax cuts lead to lower public spending, rather than higher debt levels and higher taxes in the future. This paper uses the institutional setting of German fiscal federalism to its advantage in order to explore how fiscal policy reacts to exogenous...

On 3 June 2020, the German government announced a temporary value added tax (VAT) rate reduction. VAT rates were reduced on 1 July 2020 and went back to their previous level on 1 January 2021. We study the price effects of the temporary VAT rate reduction using a web-scraped data set covering...

We study the effect of monetary surprise shocks on real output and the price level, conditioned on different fiscal sustainability regimes in the period 2001Q4-2021Q4. First, we estimate time-varying fiscal sustainability coefficients based on Bohn's (1998) approach through Schlicht's (2003)...