This paper estimates the causal effect of fiscal rules on fiscal balances in a panel of 142 countries over the period 1985-2015. Our instrumental variable strategy exploits the geographical diffusion of fiscal rules across countries. The intuition is that reforms in neighboring countries may...

The paper presents a simple model for discussing the effects of deficit limits and budget rules on fiscal policy. I find that limits on deficit-output ratios provide incentives to implement procyclical policies when the economy is in intermediate states, and countercyclical policies only in very...

This paper uses a simple model to analyze the forces that determine the size of the public sector and the quality of workers employed in that sector. Workers are heterogeneous, and the public sector chooses an employment strategy that maximizes a social welfare function U(s, Y) that depends on...

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 “fiscal deficit bias” and the empirical evidence on the economic, political and institutional factors leading to this bias....

A New Keynesian model with government production, public compensation, and unemployment is fit to U.S. data to study the macroeconomic and fiscal effects of public wage reductions. We find that accounting for the type of government spending is crucial for its macroeconomic implications. Although...

This paper presents a model-based fiscal Taylor rule and a toolkit to assess the fiscal stance, defined as the change in the structural primary balance. This is built on the normative buffer-stock model of the government (Fournier, 2019) which includes key channels like hysteresis,...

This paper investigates the effects of fiscal consolidation announcements on sovereign spreads in a panel of 21 emerging market economies during 2000-18. We construct a novel dataset using a global news database to identify the precise announcement date of fiscal consolidation actions. Our...

Fiscal sustainability remains a paramount challenge for small economies with high debt and greater vulnerability to climate change. This paper applies the model-based sustainability test for fiscal policy in a panel of 16 Caribbean countries during the period 1980-2018. The results indicate that...

How do policy communications on future f iscal targets af fect market expectations and beliefs about the future conduct of f iscal policy? In this paper, we develop indicators of f iscal credibility that quantify the degree to which policy announcements anchor expectations, based on the...