After the Global Financial Crisis a controversial rush to fiscal austerity followed in many countries. Yet research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates was and still is unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This paper...

We link detailed data on defense spending, wages, hours, employment, establishments, and GDP across U.S. cities to study the effects of fiscal stimulus. Our small-open-economy empirical setting permits us to estimate key macroeconomic outcomes and elasticities, including the responses of the...

Broadly defined, macroeconomic forecasting is alive and well. Nonstructural forecasting which is based largely on reduced-form correlations, has always been well and continues toquot; improve. Structural forecasting, which aligns itself with economic theory and hence rises andquot; falls with...

We investigate the role of macroprudential policies in mitigating liquidity traps driven by deleveraging, using a simple Keynesian model. When constrained agents engage in deleveraging, the interest rate needs to fall to induce unconstrained agents to pick up the decline in aggregate demand....

An otherwise conventional Keynesian macro model is modified to include inventories of final goods by (1) drawing a distinction between production and final sales, and (2) allowing for a negative effect of the level of inventories on production. Two models are presented: one in which the labor...

This paper summarizes the results of a large recent literature on multi year fiscal plans for deficit reduction (austerity). The key results are that deficit reduction policies based upon spending cuts are much less costly in terms of short run output losses than tax based adjustments. On...

This paper makes two contributions. First, we examine the macroeconomic implications of Puerto Rico's Fiscal Plan that was certified in March 2017 for fiscal years 2017-18 to 2026-27. Second, we perform a Debt Sustainability Analysis (DSA) that incorporates the expected macroeconomic dynamics...

The paper explores the macroeconomic consequences of fiscal consolidations whose timing and composition are uncertain. Drawing on the evidence in Alesina and Ardagna (2010), we emphasize whether or not the fiscal consolidation is driven by tax rises or expenditure cuts. We find that the...

This ppaer studies how the composition of fiscal adjustments influences their likelihood of success, defined as a long lasting deficit reduction, and their macroeconomic consequences. We find that fiscal adjustments which rely primarily on spending cuts on transfers and the government wage bill...

In earlier work we documented two episodes in which a sharp fiscal consolidation was associated with a very large expansions in private domestic demand. In this paper we draw on further evidence to investigate if and when fiscal policy changes can have such non-Keynesian effects. In the first...