This paper shows how the richer frequency and variety of fiscal policy shocks available in an international sample can be analyzed recognizing the heterogeneity that exists across different countries. The main conclusion of our empirical analysis is that the question "what is the fiscal policy...

A shift in taxes or in government spending (a quot;fiscal shockquot;) at some point in time puts a constraint on the path of taxes and spending in the future, since the government intertemporal budget constraint will eventually have to be met. This simple fact is surprisingly overlooked in...

This paper summarizes the results of a large recent literature on multi year fiscal plans for deficit reduction (austerity). The key results are that deficit reduction policies based upon spending cuts are much less costly in terms of short run output losses than tax based adjustments. On...