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...

Using bootstrap panel analysis, allowing for cross-country correlation, without the need of pre-testing for unit roots, we study the causality between government spending and revenue for the EU in the period 1960-2006. We find spend-and-tax causality for Italy, France, Spain, Greece, and...

In this study, we analyze the cyclicality of fiscal policies in China during the period 1978-2013. We find that the cyclicality of local government spending in China significantly affects the cyclicality of total government spending. By employing both time-series and province-level panel data,...

This paper studies the implications of changes in the fiscal (spending-tax) policy mix when all categories of spending and taxes are according to their functional breakdown. In so doing, we build a general equilibrium OLG model which naturally incorporates the main functional categories of...

We assess the consequences of fiscal consolidation episodes on public sector efficiency (scores) for 35 OECD countries for the 2007-2020 period. We find that fiscal consolidations improve public sector efficiency and results are robust across efficiency models. Moreover, peripheral euro-area...

We evaluate the impact of government spending efficiency on fiscal sustainability for a panel of 35 OECD countries during the period of 2007-2020. To answer our research question we first compute the magnitude of the responses of government revenues to changes in government spending. Next, we...

We assess public finances solvency for Euro Area countries using quarterly data between 1999Q1 and 2020Q4. Through a country-by-country analysis, the answer to the title question is true. For most countries, (i) the primary budget balance reacts positively to the lagged public debt ratio and...

This paper empirically links the efficiency and performance assessment of the general government, proxied by efficiency scores, to the trust in government. Government spending efficiency scores are first computed via data envelopment analysis (DEA). Then, relying on panel data and instrumental...