This paper analyzes the incentives of a government facing electoral uncertainty to implement structural reforms in the presence of a deficit restriction. In designing a reform package, the government faces a trade-off between enhancing its electoral chances by providing compensation to private...

This paper documents time variation in fiscal policy multipliers in Germany, the UK and the US over the period 1971–2009. The analysis is based on a quarterly vector autoregression (VAR) model. For the German and the UK cases, the VAR is augmented by “global factors” representing...