This paper empirically investigates the impact of populist governments on public policies and finances. We focus on Italian local governments (i.e. municipalities) over the 2010-2019 period, when a populists, i.e. the Five Stars Movement, became the most voted party in the country. We first...

In this letter, we use the Proxy-SVAR approach to investigate fiscal multipliers in Italy. We also estimate distinct multipliers for the Centre-North and the South. Our findings are consistent with the Keynesian view that advocates positive government spending multipliers and point at higher...

This paper studies tax policy interaction among local governments for both mobile and immobile tax bases. We exploit exogenous changes in the local tax setting of German municipalities due to participation in state debt reduction programs to learn about the size, scope and nature of strategic...

Following the onset of the pandemic, the Federal Reserve employed an unconventional monetary policy that directly intervened in municipal bond markets. We characterize the fiscal and macroeconomic implications of such central bank actions in a New Keynesian model of a monetary union. We assume...