The stylized facts of government finance in the Group of Seven (G-7) industrial countries show that revenues lag real GDP procyclically, while government spending in most cases fails to lead the economy procyclically. This finding is not confined to transfers but also applies to the wage...

Building on the automatic fiscal stabilisers literature, this paper assesses how automatic stabilisers have evolved over the past two decades by analysing changes in the personal income tax and social benefit systems. In three-quarters of the 35 OECD countries analysed, indicators of the...

This paper estimates the effects of fiscal stimulus on economic activity using a novel database on large fiscal expansions for 17 OECD countries for the period 1960–2006. The database is constructed by combining the statistical approach to identifying large shifts in fiscal policy with...

To enrich the debate about the fiscal effectiveness of sovereign wealth funds, this paper explores the effect of sovereign wealth funds (more precisely sovereign oil funds, SOFs) on the government spending in real term and as a share of GDP. First, we evaluate the relationship between the...

This paper introduces a Regime-Switching Model-Based Sustainability test allowing for periodic (or local) violations of Bohn (1998, QJE)'s sustainability condition. We assume a Markov-switching fiscal policy rule whose parameters stochastically switch between sustainable and unsustainable...

In this paper, we set out to examine an efficient fiscal-policy framework for a monetary union. We illustrate that fiscal policy's bias toward budget deficit only temporarily ceased at the end of the 20th century as European countries endeavored to qualify for euro-zone membership, which...

The fiscal deficit is "ill defined"; it is "without theoretical background"; it is "a number in search of a concept". Such judgements are characteristic of a prominent part of the literature on the new measurement concept of generational accounting. This paper argues that such criticism is...

I estimate fiscal reaction functions to analyze the cyclical behavior of discretionary measures in the euro area and the potential impact of changes in the fiscal framework. The core is to analyze whether fiscal rules have an asymmetric impact on discretionary measures over the cycle. First,...

We implement a meta-regression-analysis for the budgetary impact of numerical fiscal rules. Based on 30 studies published in the last decade, we offer a consensus estimate with respect to the level of statistical significance, provide suggestive evidence for the effect size, and identify study...

The primary objective of rule-based fiscal legislation at the subnational level in India is to achieve debt sustainability by placing a ceiling on borrowing and the use of borrowed resources for public capital investment by phasing out deficits in the budget revenue account. This paper examines...