This paper analyzes the impact of strained government finances on macroeconomic stability and the transmission of fiscal policy. Using a variant of the model by Curdia and Woodford (2009), we study a 'sovereign risk channel' through which sovereign default risk raises funding costs in the...

This paper studies how the effects of government spending vary with the economic environment. Using a panel of OECD countries, we identify fiscal shocks as residuals from an estimated spending rule and trace their macroeconomic impact under different conditions regarding the exchange rate...

This paper studies the effectiveness of Euro Area (EA) fiscal policy, during the recent financial crisis, using an estimated New Keynesian model with a bank. A key dimension of policy in the crisis was massive government support for banks—that dimension has so far received little attention in...

Existing empirical estimates of US nationwide tax multipliers vary from close to zero to very large. Using narrative measures as proxies for structural shocks to total tax revenues in an SVAR, we estimate tax multipliers at the higher end of the range: around two on impact and up to three after...

The sovereign debt problems in European countries have increased the interest in fiscal watchdogs. This paper discusses the world’s oldest fiscal watchdog, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB). CPB was founded directly after World War II. It has built a reputation of...

We identify government spending news and surprise shocks using a novel identification based on the Survey of Professional Forecasters. News shocks lead to an increase of the interest rate, a real appreciation of US dollar and a worsening of the trade balance. The opposite is found for the...

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of fiscal policy by studying, using household-level data, how households respond to shifts in government spending. Our identification strategy allows us to control for time-specific aggregate effects, such as the stance of monetary policy or the...

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis and great recession, many countries face substantial deficits and growing debts. In the United States, federal government outlays as a ratio to GDP rose substantially from about 19.5 percent before the crisis to over 24 percent after the crisis. In...

We examine global dynamics under infinite-horizon learning in New Keynesian models where the interest-rate rule is subject to the zero lower bound. As in Evans, Guse and Honkapohja (2008), the intended steady state is locally but not globally stable. Unstable deflationary paths emerge after...

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the state of macroeconomic modeling and the use of macroeconomic models in policy analysis has come under heavy criticism. Macroeconomists in academia and policy institutions have been blamed for relying too much on a particular class of...