This paper finds that debt-financed fiscal multipliers vary depending on the location of the debt buyer. In a sample of 33 countries fiscal multipliers are larger when government purchases are financed by issuing debt to foreign investors (non-residents), compared to when they are financed by...

Identifying fiscal multipliers is usually constrained by the absence of a counterfactual scenario. Our new data set allows overcoming this problem by making use of the fact that recommendations under the EU's excessive deficit procedure (EDP) provide both a baseline no-policy-change scenario and...

How much did fiscal policy contribute to euro area real GDP growth during the Great Recession? We estimate that discretionary fiscal measures have increased annualized quarterly real GDP growth during the crisis by up to 1.6 percentage points. We obtain our result by using an extended version of...

We study the incidence and severity of lower-bound episodes and the efficacy of three types of state-dependent policies—forward guidance about the future path of interest rates, large-scale asset purchases and spending-based fiscal stimulus—in ameliorating the adverse consequences stemming...

In this paper, we examine the macroeconomic effects of alternative fiscal consolidation policies in the New Area-Wide Model (NAWM), a two-country open-economy model of the euro area developed at the European Central Bank (cf. Coenen et al., 2007). We model fiscal consolidation as a permanent...

Can discretionary increases in government spending stimulate the economy? We answer this question by taking into account both the information flow on fiscal measures and the role played by information frictions. Using a novel set of empirical proxies for fiscal news and agents' misperceptions,...

This paper attempts to gauge the effects of various fiscal and monetary policy rules on macroeconomic outcomes in the euro area. It consists of two major parts – a historical assessment and an assessment based on an extended scenario until 2030 – and it builds on the ECB-BASE –a...

This paper proposes a central fiscal capacity for the euro area that generates transfers in response to eurozone, country, and region-specific shocks. The main novelty of this fiscal capacity is that it allows a joint response to these three types of shocks within a single scheme. Based on NUTS3...

The global financial crisis has lead to a renewed interest in discretionary fiscal stimulus. Advocates of discretionary measures emphasize that government spending can stimulate additional private spending — the Keynesian multiplier effect. Thus, we investigate whether the spending package...

We investigate the impact of fiscal stimuli at different levels of the government debt-to-GDP-ratio for a sample of 17 European countries from 1970 to 2010. This is implemented in an interacted panel VAR framework in which all coefficient parameters are allowed to change continuously with the...