Government fiscal aggregates are often manipulated over the course of the business cycle in order to provide counter-cyclical stimulus. Changes that are not discretionary--the so-called "built-in stabilizers"--also significantly vary over the business cycle, in a manner that is even more...

As the world economy slowly recovers from the very deep and widespread recession of recent years, many countries confront very serious fiscal imbalances. How much time they have to deal with these imbalances is a central question, the salience of which can only have been increased by the ongoing...