This paper investigates the heterogenous effects of budget balance rules on fiscal policy in a large sample of countries. To derive country-specific treatment effects of fiscal rules and conduct inference, we use a Synthetic Difference-in-Differences Method. Our results indicate that countries...

Although the Netherlands entered the so-called Great Lockdown with a strong fiscal position, the Dutch fiscal balance is projected to deteriorate by an unprecedented magnitude, largely as a result of necessary fiscal measures deployed to weather the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This...

Although the budget deficit and the public debt feature prominently in political debate and economic research, there is no agreement about how they should be measured. They can be defined for different sets of public institutions, including the nested sets corresponding to central government,...

We look at the effect of exchange rate regimes on fiscal discipline, taking into account the effect of underlying political conditions. We present a model where strong politics (defined as policymakers facing longer political horizon and higher cohesion) are associated with better fiscal...

This paper examines the rationale for the imposition of fiscal rules as a way to reduce budgetary imbalances. It presents theoretical arguments for the existence of a quot;fiscal deficit biasquot; and the empirical evidence on the economic, political and institutional factors leading to this...

Adoption of fiscal rules and fiscal councils continued to increase globally over the last decades based on two new global datasets. During the pandemic, fiscal frameworks were put to test. The widespread use of escape clauses was one of the novelties in this crisis, which helped provide policy...

This paper assesses Japan’s fiscal stance in the past and the future with a stochastic structural model called the Buffer-Stock Model of the Government. Our retrospective analysis suggests that the fiscal stance in the 1990s and the early 2000s was overall looser than the model...

This paper examines how debt maturity affects the debt limit, defined as the maximum amount of debt a government can afford without defaulting. We develop a model where investors are risk neutral, the primary balance is stochastic but exogenous, and default occurs solely due to the government's...

Do persistently low nominal interest rates mean that governments can safely borrow more? To address this question, I extend the model of Ghosh et al. [2013] to allow for persistent stochastic changes in nominal interest and growth rates. The key model parameter is the long-run difference between...

This paper examines the institutional arrangements of the macro-fiscal function in 16 African countries. Most ministries of finance (MoFs) have established a macro-fiscal department or unit, but their functions, size, structure and outputs vary considerably. Based on a survey, we present data on...