Over the past several decades, meta-analysis has emerged as a widely accepted tool to understand economics research. Meta-analyses often challenge the established conventional wisdom of their respective fields. We systematically review a wide range of influential meta-analyses in economics and...

We use novel German survey data to investigate how perceptions and information about public finances influence attitudes towards public debt and fiscal rules. On average, people strongly underestimate the debt-to-GDP ratio, overestimate the interest-to-tax-revenue ratio and favor a tighter...

We show that the large elasticity of substitution between capital and labor estimated in the literature on average, 0.9, can be explained by three factors: publication bias, use of aggregated data, and omission of the first-order condition for capital. The mean elasticity conditional on the...

The empirical literature on the impact of corporate taxes on economic growth reaches ambiguous conclusions: corporate tax cuts increase, reduce, or do not significantly affect growth. We apply meta-regression methods to a novel dataset with 441 estimates from 42 primary studies. There is...

We show that fiscal multiplier estimations may be biased by movements in asset and credit markets, as they facilitate spurious correlations of changes in cyclically adjusted revenues and spending with GDP growth via an identification bias and an omitted variable bias, thus overstating episodes...

The fiscal multiplier is a condensed key figure of the complex transmission mechanism of fiscal policy into output. I give an overview and systemize the numerous contributions to the theory and measurement of multipliers. The analysis is not confined to a certain model class but is intended to...