This paper explores how discretionary fiscal policies on the revenue side of the government budget have reacted to economic fluctuations in European Union countries. For this purpose, it uses data on legislated revenue changes and structural indicators provided twice per year by national central...

We empirically investigate the effects of fiscal policy on bank balance sheets, focusing on episodes of fiscal consolidation. To this aim, we employ a very large data set of individual banks' balance sheets, combined with a newly compiled data set on fiscal consolidations. We find that standard...

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...