In this paper we provide a formal test of Barro's tax-smoothing model, using Spanish data covering the period 1850-2022. First, we found that the tax-tilting component has been very important for the Spanish government and is a symptom of the existence of a public deficit bias that has existed...

We provide a test of the sustainability of the Spanish government deficit over the period 1850-2000, from the estimation of a cointegration relationship between government expenditures and revenues derived from the inter-temporal budget constraint. The longer than usual span of the data allows...