In an economy with financial imperfections, Ricardian equivalence holds when prices are flexible and the steady-state distribution of consumption is uniform, or labor is inelastic. With different steady-state consumption levels, Ricardian equivalence fails, but tax cuts, somewhat paradoxically,...

We report estimates of the fiscal multiplier for interwar Britain based on quarterly data and time-series econometrics. We find that the government-expenditure multiplier was in the range 0.3 to 0.9 even during the period when interest rates were at the lower bound. The scope for a 'Keynesian...

Sovereign risk premia in several euro area countries have risen markedly since 2008, driving up credit spreads in the private sector as well. We propose a New Keynesian model of a two-region monetary union that accounts for this "sovereign risk channel." The model is calibrated to the euro area...

What is the impact of surprise and anticipated policy changes when agents form expectations using adaptive learning rather than rational expectations? We examine this issue using the standard stochastic real business cycle model with lump-sum taxes. Agents combine knowledge about future policy...

How much additional tax revenue can the government generate by increasing labor income taxes? In this paper we provide a quantitative answer to this question, and study the importance of the progressivity of the tax schedule for the ability of the government to generate tax revenues. We develop...

I analyze the effects of an increase in government purchases financed entirely through seignorage, in both a classical and a New Keynesian framework, and compare them with those resulting from a more conventional debt-financed stimulus. My findings point to the importance of nominal rigidities...

Using a long span of expenditure survey data and a new narrative measure of exogenous income tax changes for the United Kingdom, we show that households with mortgage debt exhibit large and persistent consumption responses to tax changes. Home-owners without a mortgage, in contrast, do not...

During the global financial crisis 2007--2009 fiscal policy was widely used as a stabilization tool. Policymakers allowed a large build-up of public debt resulting from both automatic and discretionary expansionary measures. At the same time, calls for policy coordination stressed that...

We analyze empirically the cyclical behavior of fiscal policy among a group of 23 OECD countries. We introduce a framework to capture fiscal policy stance in a way that brings together automatic stabilizers and discretionary fiscal policy. We show that, for most countries, automatic changes in...

We compare the output and unemployment effects of fiscal adjustments in different types of government outlays in the US, Canada, Japan, and the UK. We identify shocks in government consumption, investment, vacancies and government wages in a SVAR using sign restrictions extracted from a...