Recent studies have found considerable partisan polarization of both reality and policy preferences in the US. Furthermore, this polarization is so entrenched that it is immune to the provision of factual information. Has the COVID-19 pandemic, which affects citizens unequally, reproduced or...

This paper studies how and why consumers respond to unexpected, transitory income shocks. In a randomized control trial, I elicit marginal propensities to consume (MPC) out of different hypothetical income shock scenarios, varying the payment mode, the shock size, and the source of income. The...

We study the effects of different financing rules for untargeted energy price brakes and subsidies on intergenerational welfare in a large-scale overlapping generations model. The results indicate that, in comparison with a laissez-faire solution without any government interventions,...

This paper analyses the level of inequality in Spain and how it evolved over the course of the past crisis and the early stages of the current recovery. To this end, it first introduces the various dimensions of wage, income, consumption and wealth inequality, and studies how they have...

Cloyne (2013) constructs a novel dataset documenting fiscal tax shocks in the United Kingdom using the narrative approach developed by Romer and Romer (2010), and estimates the impact of tax changes on GDP. He finds that a tax cut of one percent of GDP causes a 0.6 percent increase in output in...

The Structural Vector Auto-regression (SVAR) approach to estimating fiscal multipliers, following the seminal paper by Blanchard and Perotti (2002), has been widely applied in the literature. In our pa-per we discuss the interpretation of these estimates and suggest that they are more useful for...

Die zentrale finanzpolitische Aufgabe der kommenden Jahre wird die Konsolidierung der öffentlichen Haushalte sein. Auch nach Bewältigung der Rezession werden weiterhin "strukturelle" Defizite in einer Größenordnung von drei bis vier Prozent des Bruttoinlandsprodukts bestehen bleiben....

Recent evidence on the impact of fiscal policy – taxes, public expenditures and budget deficits – on long-run growth in OECD countries has adopted the Barro (1990) framework to distinguish between ‘productive' and ‘unproductive' expenditures, and ‘distortionary' and...