This paper examines the association between episodes of large fiscal impulses (expansions and adjustments) and sustainable development indicators (prosperity, resilience, and inclusivity). We provide country studies of Chile, Poland, South Africa, and Thailand, examining the components of...

We investigate the implications of extra-normal government spending under the COVID-19 pandemic for commercial bank lending growth between 2019Q4 and 2020Q4 in a large sample of over 3000 banks from 71 countries. We control for pre-pandemic structural factors, bank characteristics and government...

We trace the linkages between the episodes of fiscal expansion and consolidation in 72 advanced and emerging and developing economies. The findings suggest that fiscal expansions are positively associated with economic growth, which in turn is positively linked with better sustainable...

We consider a model in which the level of taxes and seignorage are too low to finance government expenditures and debt service. Government debt will therefore grow without bound, implying the eventual need to change policy. Starting with utility maximization, we analyze the effect of the...

This paper compares fiscal cyclicality across advanced and developing countries, geographic regions as well as income levels over 1960-2016 period, then identifies factors that explain countries' government spending and tax-policy cyclicality. Public debt/tax base ratio provides a more robust...

This case study compares the importance of prevailing market factors against that of COVID-19 dynamics and policy responses in explaining the evolution of Eurozone (EZ) sovereign spreads during the first half of 2020. Focusing on daily Eurozone CDS spreads, we adopt a multi-stage econometric...

We define the notion of a 'de facto fiscal space' of a country as the inverse of the tax-years it would take to repay the public debt. Specifically, we measure the outstanding public debt relative to the de facto tax base, where the latter measures the realized tax collection, averaged across...

Conventional wisdom is that good economic conditions or expansionary fiscal policy help incumbents get re-elected, but this has not been tested in a large cross-section of countries. We test these arguments in a sample of 74 countries over the period 1960-2003. We find no evidence that deficits...

Like other recent studies, we find the existence of a political deficit cycle in a large cross-section of countries. However, we find that this result is driven by the experience of new democracies'. The strong budget cycle in those countries accounts for the finding of a budget cycle in larger...

We propose and solve an optimizing model which explains counterintuitive effects of fiscal policy in terms of expectations. If government spending follows an upward-trending stochastic process which the public believes may fall sharply when it reaches specific "target points," then optimizing...