We investigate the interdependence of fiscal policies, and in particular deficits, in the European Union using an empirical analysis based on real-time fiscal data. There are many potential reasons why fiscal policies could be interdependent, such as direct externalities due to cross-border...

We seek to understand how Laffer curves differ across countries in the US and the EU-14, thereby providing insights into fiscal limits for government spending and the service of sovereign debt. As an application, we analyze the consequences for the permanent sustainability of current debt...

We calibrate an infinite-horizon model with endogenous growth and unemployment on actual data from the largest countries in the European Union. Two types of balanced-budget fiscal policy experiments are studied. First, the effects of separately changing the tax rates on capital, labor and...

This paper proposes a moment-matching method for approximating vector autoregressions by finite-state Markov chains. The Markov chain is constructed by targeting the conditional moments of the underlying continuous process. The proposed method is more robust to the number of discrete values and...

As the economics profession is split over the expected impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, we analyze the effects as if it were an experiment. Specifically, we analyze the effects of spending on employment using a difference-in-difference approach by state. To date, we...

This paper develops a non-linear theoretical relationship between public spending and economic growth. The model identifies the “optimal” size of government and the “optimal” composition of government spending. Given the size of the government, different allocations of public resources...

We study the behavior of output, employment, consumption, and investment in Germany during the Great Depression of 1928-37. In this time period, real wages were countercyclical, and productivity and fiscal policy was procyclical. We use the neoclassical growth model to investigate how much these...

We decompose aggregate saving and investment into its public and private components and then document a variety of ``stylized facts'' associated with saving and investment rates for a sample of 15 countries over the period 1975--1989. In order to see whether these empirical relationships are...

Fiscal policy has become quite controversial in the post-Keynesian era, the debate over the Obama stimulus package being a contentious recent example. Some pundits go so far as to take the position that macroeconomic theory has failed to meaningfully progress in terms of providing useful...

This paper analyses the effect of public expenditures in the context of a modified Solow model of capital accumulation with optimising agents. The model identifies optimal government size and optimal composition of public expenditures which maximize the rate of growth in the dynamics to the...