The recent Financial Crisis reminded us once again about the vulnerability of the global economy. Economists were forced to think about the effectiveness of their policies. During this period, many governments across the world had adopted fiscal measures to boost their local economies. The path...

Fiscal policy has become quite controversial in the post-Keynesian era, the debate over the Obama stimulus package being a contentious recent example. Some pundits go so far as to take the position that macroeconomic theory has failed to meaningfully progress in terms of providing useful...

We analyse the effects of a government spending expansion in a DSGE model with Mortensen-Pissarides labour market frictions, deep habits in private and public consumption, investment adjustment costs, a constant-elasticity-of-substitution (CES) production function, and adjustments in employment...

Viard observes that fiscal stimulus to aggregate demand must be properly timed because stimulus 'borrows' output and jobs from the future rather than creating them from thin air. He also argues that increases in government purchases do not necessarily provide a larger (correctly measured)...

This paper uses the Aguiar and Gopinath (2007) methodology in order to estimate whether 'the cycle is the trend' in 23 emerging markets and 22 OECD economies. These estimates are then used to test whether procyclical fiscal policy in emerging countries is due to persistent shocks to per-capita...

This paper analyzes the impact of cyclical fiscal policy on industry growth. Using Rajan and Zingales' (1998) difference-in-difference methodology on a panel data sample of manufacturing industries across 15 OECD countries over the period 1980-2005, we show that industries with relatively...

In this study, we analyze the cyclicality of fiscal policies in China during the period 1978-2013. We find that the cyclicality of local government spending in China significantly affects the cyclicality of total government spending. By employing both time-series and province-level panel data,...

Simple time series regressions for 37 low-income African countries during 1960-2004 suggest that government consumption is highly procyclical, with consumption responding more than proportionately to fluctuations in output in many cases. The results from a cross-country specification suggest...

This paper presents a political economy theory of the behavior of fiscal policy over the business cycle. The theory predicts that, in both booms and recessions, fiscal policies are set so that the marginal cost of public funds obeys a submartingale. In the short run, fiscal policy can be...

The recent decades have been marked by major instabilities that have increased the sensitivity of Tunisian business cycles to internal and external shocks. The economists must take this structural problem into account in their current decisions. Therefore, most institutional reforms were made in...