This paper investigates the role of informality in affecting the magnitude of the fiscal multiplier in a panel of 141 countries, using the local projections method. We find a strong negative relationship between the degree of informality and the size of the fiscal multiplier. This result holds...

To accurately quantify the effects of government spending, it is necessary to identify exogenous changes in government spending. In this paper, we estimate a proxy VAR, developed by Stock and Watson (2012) and Mertens and Ravn (2013), using a revised supplementary budget from the government as...

Advanced economies face two important trends: population aging and rising debt. In the coming years it will be critical to understand how policies undertaken by governments interact with their changing age structures. In a panel of advanced economies, I show that fiscal deficit consolidation...

In recent years, many countries have sought to transform their fiscal frameworks, with the aim of rendering their public finances more sustainable and preventing the emergence of fiscal problems. This report presents the findings of comparative research into the fiscal frameworks of five...

Studies of the effect of government spending on unemployment are potentially confounded by reverse causality. To address the endogeneity problem, we exploit variation in a pork-barrel road-building program, and find that higher government expenditure on road-building substantially reduces local...

We explore the underlying determinants of the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy and tax and social security reform using the IMF's Global Fiscal Model (GFM). We show that the planning horizon of consumers, access to financial markets, and the elasticity of labor supply, as well as the...

This paper studies the effects of fiscal policy on private GDP, inflation and the long-term interest rate in Italy using a structural vector autoregression model. To this end, a database of quarterly cash data for selected fiscal variables for the period 1982:1-2004:4 is constructed, largely...

We quantify the impact of government spending shocks in the US. Thereby, we control for fiscal foresight by utilizing the narrative approach. Moreover, we surmount the generic limited information problem inherent in vector autoregressions (VARs) by a factor-augmented VAR (FAVAR) approach. We...

This paper analyses the effects of discretionary fiscal policy by presenting new empirical evidence for Germany within a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) framework. Following Blanchard and Perotti (2002), the SVAR model is identified by applying institutional information. We find no...

This paper characterizes the dynamic effects of net tax and government spending shocks on prices, interest rate, GDP and its private components in four OECD countries using a structural VAR approach. For the first time in this literature, I propose a structural decomposition of total net taxes...