This paper investigates how expectations about future government spending affect the transmission of fiscal policy shocks. We study the effects of two different types of government spending shocks in the United States: (i) spending shocks that are accompanied by an expected reversal of public...

We quantify the fiscal multipliers in response to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. We extend the benchmark Smets-Wouters (Smets and Wouters, 2007) New Keynesian model, allowing for credit-constrained households, the zero lower bound, government capital and distortionary...

The apparent success of independent central banks in conducting monetary policy has led many to argue that some form of policy delegation should also be applied to the macroeconomic aspects of fiscal policy. A number of countries have recently established Fiscal Councils, although their role is...

This paper describes a procedure for assessing the effects of the budget on economic activity in the short term. Based on counterfactual simulations of an econometric model, the procedure takes into account more relationships between the budget and the economy than other, more synthetic...

After entering the EU in 1986, Portugal benefited from low interest rates and some growth momentum. However, the difficulty in taming fiscal imbalances, the pro-cyclicality of fiscal policy, the use of extraordinary fiscal measures, coupled with the 2008-2009 economic and financial crisis led to...

This paper explores how discretionary fiscal policies on the revenue side of the government budget have reacted to economic fluctuations in European Union countries. For this purpose, it uses data on legislated revenue changes and structural indicators provided twice per year by National Central...

Fiscal policy is an important government tool for managing the economy, having the ability to affect the total amount of output produced - GDP. Changes in the level and composition of government spending, taxation or other instruments of fiscal policy have impact on aggregate demand, the pattern...

This Policy Analysis explains the antecedents of the current global financial crisis and critically examines the reasoning behind the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve's actions to prop up the financial sector. It argues that recovery from the financial crisis is likely to be slow with or...

This paper investigates the effect of fiscal consolidation on GDP per capita following the 2008 Financial Crisis and European Debt Crisis. I use the synthetic control method to assess the GDP performance of three European countries that pursued large quantities of fiscal consolidation: Greece,...

This paper analyzes German and Spanish fiscal policy using simple policy rules. We choose Germany and Spain, as both are Member States in the European Monetary Union (EMU) and underwent considerable increases in public debt in the early 1990s. We focus on the question, how fiscal policy behaves...