As governments around the world contemplate slashing budget deficits, the “expansionary fiscal consolidation hypothesis” is back in vogue. I argue that, as a statement about the short run, it should be taken with caution. Alesina and Perotti (1995) and Alesina and Ardagna (2010) (AAP) have...

With fiscal foresight, the shocks identified by standard Vector Autoregression (SVAR) techniques can be non-fundamental for the variables of interest. In an important paper, Ramey (2011) uses direct measures of the private sector’s forecast revisions of defense or federal spending to estimate...

During a fiscal stimulus, does it matter, for the size of the government spending multiplier, which category of agents bears the brunt of the current and/or future adjustment in taxes? In an economy with heterogeneous agents and imperfect financial markets, the answer depends on whether or not...

With perfect credit markets, any (lump-sum) tax redistribution is neutral. We study the e¤ects of a tax redistribution in an economy with heterogenous agents and borrowing constraints. Under ?exible prices, a tax redistribution that favors "the poor" (i.e., the credit constrained) is neutral,...

The effects of public debt and redistribution are intimately related. We illustrate this in a model with heterogenous agents and imperfect credit markets. Our setup di¤ers from the classic Savers-Spenders model of ?scal policy in that all agents engage in intertemporal optimization, but a...

In an economy with financial imperfections, Ricardian equivalence holds when prices are flexible and the steady-state distribution of consumption is uniform, or labor is inelastic. With different steady-state consumption levels, Ricardian equivalence fails, but tax cuts, somewhat paradoxically,...

The paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a version of the career concerns model of political agency with endogenous entry of political candidates. The evidence...

Using a structural Vector Autoregression approach, this paper compares the macroeconomic effects of the three main government spending tools: government investment, consumption, and transfers to households, both in terms of the size and the speed of their effects on GDP and its components....

This paper studies the effects of fiscal policy on GDP, inflation and interest rates in 5 OECD countries, using a structural Vector Autoregression approach. Its main results can be summarized as follows: 1) The effects of fiscal policy on GDP tend to be small: government spending multipliers...