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...

May 2022 marked the 90th anniversary of the end of Heinrich Brüning’s term as Reich Chancellor. To this day, the economic effects of Brüning’s extreme austerity measures remain unclear. However, new data and calculations have made an initial quantification of the economic consequences of...

Macroeconomic models that omit the shadow economy systematically mis-forecast and mis-measure the effect of fiscal –in particular tax– policy on economic activity and tax revenue. We add an informal sector to the Bank of Greece DSGE model and use the actual package of fiscal consolidation...

The 2007/8 financial crisis has reignited the debate about austerity economics and revealed that it remains a highly contested, yet poorly understood idea. This article locates the debate in its historical context, tracing it from the early 18th and 19th century Classical debates, which focused...

This paper examines the macroeconomic effects of tax changes during fiscal consolidations. Webuild a new narrative dataset of tax changes during fiscal consolidation years, containing detailed information on the expected revenue impact, motivation, and announcement and implementation dates of...

The 2007/8 financial crisis has reignited the debate about economic austerity. With the aim of understanding why a government would pursue such a policy in the current context of persistent economic recession, this article traces the social, political and economic developments that have together...

Der Rückgang der deutschen Staatsverschuldung auf rd. 60 % des BIP in diesem Jahr ist ein Erfolg für die deutsche Haushaltspolitik. Eine Zerlegung der Entwicklung der Staatsverschuldung seit dem Jahr 2010 zeigt, dass der Schuldenabbau in Deutschland im Wesentlichen durch ein über weite...

Congress has expressed interest, one way or the other, in a balanced-budget requirement for the past six decades. Yet despite numerous attempts, the legislative body has never passed a constitutional balanced-budget amendment. Most of the analysis of why we don't yet have a constitutional...

This paper analyses two factors which may cause cyclically-adjusted budget balances to give a misleading picture of underlying fiscal trends. It first explores the implications of recent large asset-market related fluctuations in government revenues for the measurement of structural budget...

New Zealand's fiscal outlook deteriorated following the Global Financial Crisis, and in late 2008 fiscal projections showed net government debt in New Zealand increasing from 5% of GDP to around 40% within 10 years, mostly reflecting permanently lower expectations for future tax revenue. These...