The fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL) has been active for 30 years, and the interest in this theory grew with the recent global surges in inflation and government spending. This study applies the FTPL to 37 OECD countries for 2020-2022. The theory's centerpiece is the government's...

To explain the fact that government spending and tax policy are procyclical in emerging and developing countries, we develop a model for the joint behavior of optimal tax rates and government spending over the business cycle. Our set-up relies on financial frictions, which have been shown to be...

The British data from the early 1700s through World War I provide an unmatched opportunity for studying the effects of temporary changes in government purchases. In this paper I examine the effects of these changes on interest rates, the quantity of money, the price level, and budget deficits....

Because of a small direct negative effect on private spending, temporary variations in government purchases as in wartime, would have a strong positive effect on aggregate demand. Intertemporal substitution effects would direct work and production toward these periods where output was valued...

We contribute to the debate on the macroeconomic effects of fiscal stimuli by showing that the impact of government expenditure shocks depends crucially on key country characteristics, such as the level of development, exchange rate regime, openness to trade, and public indebtedness. Based on a...

Slow moving demographics are aging populations around the world and pushing many countries into an extended period of heightened fiscal stress. In some countries, taxes alone cannot or likely will not fully fund projected pension and health care expenditures. If economic agents place sufficient...

For U.S. annual data that include WWII, the estimated multiplier for temporary defense spending is 0.4-0.5 contemporaneously and 0.6-0.7 over two years. If the change in defense spending is "permanent" (gauged by Ramey's defense-news variable), the multipliers are higher by 0.1-0.2. The...

Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models that include policy rules for government spending, lump-sum transfers, and distortionary taxation on labor and capital income and on consumption expenditures are fit to U.S. data under a variety of specifications of fiscal policy rules. We obtain...

Increases in government spending trigger substitution effects--both inter- and intra-temporal--and a wealth effect. The ultimate impacts on the economy hinge on current and expected monetary and fiscal policy behavior. Studies that impose active monetary policy and passive fiscal policy...

It is well-known by now that government spending has typically been countercyclical in industrial countries and procyclical in developing economies. Most of this literature has focused on analyzing aggregate government spending or discretionary spending categories such as government consumption...