Using micro data from the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey and Current Population Survey, I document that government spending shocks affect individuals differently over the life cycle. Young households increase their consumption after an expansionary shock while prime-age households reduce it,...

We explore the short-term macrodynamics of stabilization policy at the effective lower bound (ELB) of the nominal interest rate, in an environment characterized by heterogenous and endogenously time-varying private-sector output and inflation expectations driven by evolutionary dynamics. We show...

The aim of this study is to determine the nature of the discretionary fiscal policy practiced by non-euro EU member states, namely to deduce some bias for one of the two types of fiscal policies - procyclical or countercyclical. For this purpose, we used time series for the period 1995-2020, of...

Would countercyclical fiscal policy during recessions improve or worsen the gender employment gap? We answer this question by exploring the state-dependent impact of fiscal spending shocks on employment by gender in the G-7 countries. Using the local projection method, we find that, during...

As part of Germany’s fiscal response to the Covid-19 pandemic, parents received three payments totalling e450 per child. Randomization in the payment dates and daily scanner data allow us to identify the effects of these transfers on household spending. We find a significant but small spending...

Recent influential work argue that a gradual increase in the sales tax stimulates economic activity in a liquidity trap by boosting inflation expectations. Higher public infrastructure investment should also be more expansive in a liquidity trap than in normal times by raising the potential...

We investigate the implications of extra-normal government spending under COVID-19 for commercial bank lending growth between 2019Q4 and 2020Q4 in a sample of 3000 banks from 71 countries. We control for pre-pandemic structural factors, bank characteristics and government debt. To address the...

Expansions in public spending induce a surge in private consumption that is accompanied by increasing post-tax income of households. Endogenously reacting income, however, is insufficient to rationalize conditional comovement of private and public spending: household expenditures even expand in...

We investigate the implications of extra-normal government spending under the COVID-19 pandemic for commercial bank lending growth between 2019Q4 and 2020Q4 in a large sample of over 3000 banks from 71 countries. We control for pre-pandemic structural factors, bank characteristics and government...

Despite a large body of empirical work analyzing the causal effects of fiscal stimulus on employment in developed countries, little evidence exists in developing economies and evidence from China is scarce. Using the initial share of local industries together with allocated spending announced in...

We simulate the fiscal stimulus packages set up by the German government to alleviate the costs of the COVID-19 pandemic in a dynamic New Keynesian multi-sector general equilibrium model. We find that, cumulated over 2020-2022, output losses relative to steady state can be reduced by more than 4...

Motivating with two scenarios in which the government spending in China timely reacted to output shock within a quarter, this letter points out a downward bias in the estimation of Chinese government spending multiplier using the classical lag restriction for shock identification in a quarterly...

In response to the record-breaking COVID19 recession, many governments have adopted unprecedented fiscal stimuli. While countercyclical fiscal policy is effective in fighting conventional recessions, little is known about the effectiveness of fiscal policy in the current environment with...

Debt-financed fiscal stimulus programmes directly stimulate aggregate demand through government expenditure or tax cuts, but their effectiveness is highly dependent on direct crowding out of private sector expenditure, spillover effects to the private sector through a higher risk premium on...

Almost all countries announced fiscal support programs once COVID-19 hit. However, there was significant diversity in the magnitude and composition of these fiscal stimulus programs. These differences were determined by myriad political, financial, social, and economic factors - these factors...

In HANK, we show that fiscal policy is an appropriate macroeconomic stabilization tool at the ZLB. Fiscal policy achieves the same macroeconomic aggregates and the same welfare as hypothetically unconstrained monetary policy by replicating its transmission mechanism. Consumption taxes and labor...

We simulate the fiscal stimulus packages set up by the German government to allevi-ate the costs of the COVID-19 pandemic in a dynamic New Keynesian multi-sectorgeneral equilibrium model. We find that, cumulated over 2020-2022, output lossesrelative to steady state can be reduced by more than 4...

We show that in a New Keynesian model with household heterogeneity, fiscal policy can be a perfect substitute for monetary policy: three simple conditions for consumption taxes, labor taxes, and the government debt level are sufficient to induce the same consumption and labor supply of each...

Rather than stabilising aggregate demand, discretionary fiscal policy tends to amplify cyclical fluctuations of output. The commonly accepted reasons are political economy and uncertainty. In the EU, the pro-cyclical nature of discretionary fiscal policy has also been associated with the...

Unconventional fiscal policy uses announcements of future increases in consumption taxes to generate inflation expectations and accelerate consumption expenditure. It is budget neutral and time consistent. We provide preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of such policies using changes in...

In this study, we analyze the cyclicality of fiscal policies in China during the period 1978-2013. We find that the cyclicality of local government spending in China significantly affects the cyclicality of total government spending. By employing both time-series and province-level panel data,...

We examine whether Swiss federal fiscal policy was sustainable over the period from 1900 to 2002. We perform unit root and cointegration tests for federal revenues and expenditures, taking into account a structural shift in the budgetary process related to World War II. We find sustainability...

This paper discusses the need and scope for an active fiscal stabilization policy. It is argued that the effectiveness of fiscal policy as a short run stabilizer does not depend on the long run multipliers of (balanced budget) fiscal policies. To the extent that activity can be affected by...

We assess the cyclicality of fiscal policy in the 19 Euro area countries, notably during recessions, for the period 1995-2020. We use a time-varying measure of fiscal cyclicality to describe fiscal policy developments. The results suggest that during recessions discretionary fiscal policy...

This paper empirically studies the effects of fiscal policy shocks on private consumption. Further, it tries to determine if the level of government bond yield and the unemployment rate affect that relationship. We use yearly data between 1970 and 2000 for thirty-eight countries, of which half...

This paper provides a comprehensive empirical assessment of the relation between the cyclicality of fiscal policy, output volatility, and economic growth, using a large cross-section of 88 countries over the period 1960 to 2004. Identification of the effects of (endogenous) cyclical fiscal...

Recent influential work argue that a gradual increase in sales tax stimulates economic activityin a liquidity trap by boosting inflation expectations. Higher public infrastructure investmentshould also be more expansive in a liquidity trap than in normal times by raising the potentialinterest...

In HANK, we show that fiscal policy is an appropriate macroeconomic stabilization tool at the ZLB. Fiscal policy achieves the same macroeconomic aggregates and the same welfare as hypothetically unconstrained monetary policy by replicating its transmission mechanism. Consumption taxes and labor...

We analyse the redistribution channel of a money-financed versus debt-financed fiscal stimulus in a Borrower-Saver frammework. The redistribution channel is larger when we consider a money-financed fiscal stimulus. However, it generates also larger welfare losses than a debt-financed fiscal...

This paper builds on Baqaee and Farhi (2022) and di Giovanni et al. (2022) to quantify the contribution of fiscal policy to U.S. inflation over the December 2019-June 2022 period. Model calibrations show that aggregate demand shocks explain roughly two-thirds of total model-based inflation, and...

The Scottish Government's overall budget depends both on funding from the UK government, which is determined largely via the Barnett formula, and on its own devolved revenues, borrowing and reserves, which are governed by the Fiscal Framework. This chapter of the report looks at the funding...