This paper provides evidence on the behavior of public debt managers during fiscal" stabilizations in OECD countries over the last two decades. We find that debt maturity tends to" lengthen the more credible the program, the lower the long-term interest rate and the higher the" volatility of...

Single-equation estimates of fiscal reaction functions, which relate primary surpluses to past debt-GDP ratios and control variables, are subject to potentially serious simultaneity bias that can produce misleading inferences about fiscal behavior. Biases arise from failure to model the general...

Past government spending in Japan is currently imposing a significant fiscal burden that is reflected in a net debt to output ratio near 150 percent. In addition, the aging of Japanese society implies that public expenditures and transfers payments relative to output are projected to continue to...

This paper evaluates the effects of fiscal policy on investment using a panel of OECD countries. In particular, we investigate how different types of fiscal policy affect profits and , as a result, investment. We find a sizable negative effect of public spending -- and in particular of its...

Fiscal foresight -- the phenomenon that legislative and implementation lags ensure that private agents receive clear signals about the tax rates they face in the future -- is intrinsic to the tax policy process. This paper develops an analytical framework to study the econometric implications of...

In several countries temporary terms of trade improvements have led to a deterioration of the current account. Furthermore, many of these countries failed to attain greater post-boom growth rates. The point we make is that the structure of the fiscal process is critical in determining outcomes....

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...

An impulse response is the dynamic average effect of an intervention across horizons. We use the well-known Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to explore a response's heterogeneity over time and over states of the economy. This can be implemented with a simple extension to the usual local...

A central question in applied research is to estimate the effect of an exogenous intervention or shock on an outcome. The intervention can affect the outcome and controls on impact and over time. Moreover, there can be subsequent feedback between outcomes, controls and the intervention. Many of...