Colombia has reduced extreme poverty in the past 16 years by almost half, moderate poverty by 22 percentage points, and made more than four million Colombians jump the threshold of multidimensional poverty. However, it remains one of the most unequal countries in the region, after Brazil and...

We investigate state-dependent effects of fiscal multipliers and allow for endogenous sample splitting to determine whether the US economy is in a slack state. When the endogenized slack state is estimated as the period of the unemployment rate higher than about 12 percent, the estimated...

Much of the research on fiscal multipliers has used reduced form modelling approaches. While these models have been extended to include richer controls and identification approaches, it remains unclear whether shocks identified capture the true structural shocks. An alternative way to identify...

Following a benchmarking exercise, we estimate the spending required to reach satisfactory progress in the Sustainable Development Goals in the health, education, and infrastructure sectors in Brazil. We find that there is room for savings in education (up to 1.5 percentage point of GDP) and...

The 'starving the beast' hypothesis claims that tax cuts lead to lower public spending, rather than higher debt levels and higher taxes in the future. This paper uses the institutional setting of German fiscal federalism to its advantage in order to explore how fiscal policy reacts to exogenous...

This paper analyzes whether fiscal policy in South Asia amplifies or smooths business cycle fluctuations. The paper estimates several econometric models to explore the cyclicality of government spending and tax buoyancy. The findings show that fiscal policy is procyclical in most countries. In...

Government debt in many small states has risen beyond sustainable levels and some governments are considering fiscal consolidation. This paper estimates fiscal policy multipliers for small states using two distinct models: an empirical forecast error model with data from 23 small states across...