We investigate the short-term effects of fiscal adjustment on economic activity in 20 OECD countries from 1970 to 2009. We compare two approaches: the traditional approach based on changes in cyclically adjusted primary balance (CAPB) and the narrative approach based on historical records....

Ramey (2011a) and others argue that increases in government spending associated with wars and military build-ups constitute a good instrument for measuring the macroeconomic effects of fiscal shocks. We argue that this instrument has two important drawbacks: the composition of government...

We investigate the macroeconomic effects of government spending shocks in Korea. We compare results obtained with two alternative approaches: the narrative approach and Structural Vector-Autoregressive model (SVAR). We propose a new methodology for identifying exogenous and unexpected fiscal...

The literature on estimating macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy requires suitable instruments to identify exogenous and unanticipated spending shocks. So far, the instrument of choice has been military build-ups. This instrument, however, largely limits the analysis to the US as few other...

The ‘saving for a rainy day’ hypothesis implies that households’ saving decisions reflect that they can (rationally) predict future income declines. The empirical relevance of this hypothesis plays a key role in discussions of fiscal policy multipliers and it holds under the null that the...

We estimate spillover effects of a fiscal shock in one member country in the euro area on outputs of the rest of the members, using a Global Vector Autoregression (GVAR) model. We compare the effects of a domestic fiscal shock with those of a similar size area-wide shock expressed as a weighted...

We estimate cross-border spillover effects of fiscal consolidation episodes on output, bilateral trade flows, interest rate, and the exchange rate, employing the new IMF action-based fiscal consolidation data. Results indicate a negative effect of foreign fiscal consolidation policies on...

We evaluate the impact of the global financial crisis (GFC) and recent structural changes in the patterns of hoarding international reserves (IR). We confirm that the determinants of IR hoarding evolve with developments in the global economy. During the pre-GFC period of 1999-2006, gross saving...

This paper examines the relationship between the credit constraints faced by a firm and the unit value prices of its exports. The paper modifies Arkolakis’s (2010) model of trade with heterogeneous firms by introducing endogenous quality and credit constraints. The model predicts that tighter...

This paper puts the original Reinhart-Rogoff dataset, made public by Herndon et al. (2013), to a formal econometric test to pin down debt threshold endogenously. We show that the nonlinear relation from debt to growth is not very robust. Taken with a pinch of salt, our results suggest, however,...