Recent evidence on the effect of government spending shocks on consumption cannot be easily reconciled with existing optimizing business cycle models. We extend the standard New Keynesian model to allow for the presence of rule-of-thumb (non-Ricardian) consumers. We show how the interaction of...

Only a few empirical studies have analyzed the relationship between fiscal multipliers and the underlying state of the economy. This paper investigates this link on a country-by-country basis for the G7 economies (excluding Italy). Our results show that fiscal multipliers differ across...

The existing literature on fiscal policy has mainly employed linear models that found a small fiscal multiplier in developing economies. These findings challenge the importance and e↵ectiveness of fiscal policy for these countries. However, linear models are not capable of distinguishing the...

The existing literature on fiscal policy has mainly employed linear models that found a small fiscal multiplier in developing economies. These findings challenge the importance and effectiveness of fiscal policy for these countries. However, linear models are not capable of distinguishing the...

Does the state of the business cycle matter for the effects of fiscal policy shocks on GDP? This study analyses quarterly German data from 1976 to 2009 in a threshold SVAR, expanding the SVAR approach by Blanchard and Perotti (2002). In a linear benchmark SVAR, the analysis finds that hiking...

After the Global Financial Crisis a controversial rush to fiscal austerity followed in many countries. Yet research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates was and still is unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This paper...

The existing literature on fiscal policy has mainly employed linear models that found a small fiscal multiplier in developing economies. These findings challenge the importance and effectiveness of fiscal policy for these countries. However, linear models are not capable of distinguishing the...

The existing literature on fiscal policy has mainly employed linear models that found a small fiscal multiplier in developing economies. These findings challenge the importance and e↵ectiveness of fiscal policy for these countries. However, linear models are not capable of distinguishing the...

An impulse response is the dynamic average effect of an intervention across horizons. We use the well-known Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to explore a response's heterogeneity over time and over states of the economy. This can be implemented with a simple extension to the usual local...

Galí, López-Salido, and Vallés (2007) suggest that because part of the population follow a rule-of-thumb by which they spend their entire disposable income each period, private consumption responds positively to deficit-financed increases in government spending. Key to this result is a...