This paper studies whether budget rigidities affect the probability of countries getting into fiscal distress and reduce the likelihood of governments performing fiscal adjustments. Budget rigidities are constraints that limit the ability of the government to change the size and structure of the...

This article derives time-varying threshold multipliers for G7 countries and the euro area, above which consolidation will be self-defeating (that is, leading to an increase rather than a decrease in the debt-to-GDP ratio). Simulations suggest that these thresholds have declined since the...

The literature on fiscal multipliers finds that spending-based fiscal consolidations tend to have more benign macro-economic consequences than revenue-based consolidations. By directly comparing ex-post data with consolidation plans, we present evidence of a systematically weaker follow-up of...