Generational policy is a fundamental aspect of a nation's fiscal affairs. The policy involves redistributing resources across generations and allocating to particular generations the burden of paying the government's bills. This chapter in Volume 4 of the Handbook of Public Economics shows how...

For decades, a central element of the Republican Party brand has been to call for fiscal responsibility through balanced budgets. We ask if the Republican Party has ever lived up to these ideological principles. Medicare Part D and paying for the recent Afghanistan and Iraq wars are striking...

When one thinks of efficiency in connection with government budget and fiscal policy, the first thought is usually how to find ways to make the budget and fiscal process work more efficiently. How can the funds needed to pay for government be collected and disbursed with minimum cost? A...

This paper estimates the effects of fiscal stimulus on economic activity using a novel database on large fiscal expansions for 17 OECD countries for the period 1960–2006. The database is constructed by combining the statistical approach to identifying large shifts in fiscal policy with...

The concept of fiscal imbalance is familiar to economists but less so to policymakers, politicians, and the public. Yet understanding this concept is essential to rational discussion of government financial health. This paper provides a primer on government fiscal imbalance.The material is not...

This paper investigates how numerical fiscal rules affect government investment in the EU and disentangles their effect over the business cycle. Public investment seems to be generally susceptible to cutbacks during recessions. Fiscal rules demonstrate heterogeneous effects, depending on their...

We investigate the use of financial information in the determination of budget cuts under unprecedented fiscal pressure caused by COVID-19. Especially, we concentrate on financial information such as budget execution rates, the ratio of a project’s cumulative annual executed budget (i.e.,...

This paper analyses the extent to which additional extraordinary public spending to accelerate vaccination might have been optimal in terms of minimising the public deficit. We use a budget model whose key variable is the present value of cumulative net government revenues over a period of time....

This paper proposes an approach to assess the extent of automatic fiscal stabilisation of aggregate household disposable income after a specific shock. The approach is based on the national account identity of household disposable income and elements of the OECD methodology to cyclically adjust...