Suchergebnisse

This paper derives and estimates rules for fiscal policy that prescribe the optimal response to changes in unemployment and debt. We combine the reduced form model of the economy from a linear VAR with a non-linear welfare function and obtain analytic solutions for optimal policy. The variables in our reduced form model –growth, unemployment, primary surplus– have a natural rate that cannot be affected by policy. Policy can only reduce fluctuations around these natural rates. Our welfare function contains future GDP and unemployment, the relative weights of which determine the optimal response. The optimal policy rule demands an immediate and large policy response that is procyclical to growth shocks and countercyclical to unemployment shocks. This result holds true when the weight of unemployment in the welfare function is reduced to zero. The rule currently followed by policy makers responds procyclically to both growth and unemployment shocks, and does so much slower than the optimal rule, leading to significant welfare losses.

Sweden is a front-runner in defining intermediate targets for fiscal policy (fiscal rules) as well as in setting up an independent fiscal council to monitor and comment on developments. Swedish public finances are among the most sound in the OECD having been able to consolidate public finances and ensure fiscal sustainability, and they have maintained room for fiscal manoeuvre also during the financial crisis. This paper takes a closer look at the Swedish case as the stepping stone for a more general discussion of how to set intermediate targets for fiscal policy and the role fiscal councils may have in strengthening political accountability and thus ultimately credibility of fiscal policy. The Swedish fiscal framework is compared to the fiscal compact for EU countries, and it is argued that it has a number of desirable features.

This thesis deals with selected topics in fiscal policy. The first part examines the relationship between fiscal decentralization and certain outcomes, one being the amount of trust citizens have in their government, the other being economic efficiency. The second part looks into the challenge of governments to develop fiscal systems, or policy reforms, that generate sufficient revenues to deal with long-run government budget challenges and promote economic growth at the same time.

Using the standard real business cycle model with lump-sum taxes, we analyze the impact of fiscal policy when agents form expectations using adaptive learning rather than rational expectations (RE). The output multipliers for government purchases are significantly higher under learning, and fall within empirical bounds reported in the literature (in sharp contrast to the implausibly low values under RE). Effectiveness of fiscal policy is demonstrated during times of economic stress like the recent Great Recession. Finally it is shown how learning can lead to dynamics empirically documented during episodes of "fiscal consolidations."

Written during the Second World War against the background of the economic and political futility of the 1930s, this book deals with the changing role of government, and particularly fiscal policy as an instrument for regulating the national income and its distribution. Arguing that the war had an economic basis - the inability of the great industrial nations to provide full employment at rising standards of real income - the book discusses how the failure to achieve a world order in the political sphere must be sought in the facts of economic frustration

This paper discusses fiscal policy using a DSGE model with search and matching in the labour market. Fiscal policy is effective mainly via its impact through the labour market. Although public intervention tends to crowd out private consumption, public spending also improves the matching between unemployed workers and job vacancies. The mechanism modelled in this paper shares similarity with Baxter & King (1993) and Leeper et al. (2010). The model produces positive fiscal multipliers on impact and in the short term and consistently reproduces the reaction to a spending shock of the main labour market variables such as wages, employment or labour market tightness. These results are similar with that of Monacelli et al. (2010) except that the transmission channel does not depend on the downward adjustment of the reservation wage of workers. The size of the fiscal multiplier increases with the elasticity of matching to spending and is also negatively related with the steady state spending to GDP ratio in the presence of diminishing marginal returns on spending. For large value of the multiplier, there is a crowding in of consumption and investment. Lastly, this model produces output multipliers larger than 1 in the presence of nominal price rigidities.

We assess the role played by scal policy in explaining the dynamics of asset markets. Using a panel of ten industrialized countries, we show that a positive scal shock has a negative impact in both stock and housing prices. However, while stock prices immediately adjust to the shock and the e¤ect of scal policy is temporary, housing prices gradually and persistently fall. As a result, the attempts of scal policy to mitigate stock price developments may severely de-stabilize housing markets. The empirical ndings also point to: (i) a contractionary e¤ect of scal policy on output in line with the existence of crowding-out e¤ects; (ii) a weakening of the e¤ectiveness of scal policy in recent times; (iii) signi cant scal multiplier e¤ects in the context of severe housing busts; and (iv) an increase of the sensitivity of asset prices to scal policy shocks following the process of nancial deregulation and mortgage liberalization. Finally, the evidence suggests that changes in equity prices may help governments towards consolidation of public nances. ; COMPETE; QREN; UE Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia ...

Many macroeconomists and politicans claim that fi scal austerity – getting the budget deficit down immediately – would be good for employment and growth. We think that fiscal stimulus is expansionary, and fi scal contraction is contractionary. There is a large and growing body of literature that shows that fi scal expansion can help economy to grow and reduce unemployment in near term; that certain types of fi scal stimulus are very effective and that fi scal contractions tend to lower output and employment in the short run. Fiscal austerity may be desirable for the long-term solvency and health of the economy. But it lowers growth and raises unemployment in the near term. A policy mix between new monetary strategy (nominal GDP targeting) and fi scal stimulus would be especially effective.

Intro -- DEFICIT REDUCTION AND FISCAL POLICY CONSIDERATIONS AND OPTIONS -- DEFICIT REDUCTION AND FISCAL POLICY CONSIDERATIONS AND OPTIONS -- CONTENTS -- PREFACE -- Chapter 1 REDUCING THE BUDGET DEFICIT: POLICY ISSUES∗ -- SUMMARY -- INTRODUCTION -- HOW LARGE ARE PROJECTED DEFICITS UNDER CURRENT POLICY? -- HOW MUCH DEFICIT REDUCTION IS NECESSARY? -- HOW QUICKLY SHOULD THE DEFICIT BE REDUCED? -- POLICY OPTIONS FOR DEFICIT REDUCTION -- Total Spending -- Discretionary Spending -- Mandatory Spending -- Revenues -- WHAT CAUSED THE BUDGET DEFICIT? -- CONCLUSION -- End Notes -- Chapter 2 REDUCING THE BUDGET DEFICIT: THE PRESIDENT'S FISCAL COMMISSION AND OTHER INITIATIVES∗ -- SUMMARY -- INTRODUCTION -- FEDERAL BUDGET OUTLOOK -- What is Fiscal Sustainability? -- Short-Run Issues -- Long-Run Issues -- Recent Developments -- FRAMING THE ISSUES AND EVALUATING THE TRADEOFFS -- Social Effects -- Economic Effects -- Generational Effects -- WORK OF FISCAL REFORM GROUPS -- National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform -- Discretionary Savings -- Mandatory Savings -- Social Security -- Tax Reform -- Other Reforms -- Galston-MacGuineas Plan -- Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform -- NRC/NAPA Committee on the Fiscal Future of the United States -- The Debt Reduction Task Force -- Other Groups -- End Notes -- Chapter 3 ADDRESSING THE LONG-RUN BUDGET DEFICIT: A COMPARISON OF APPROACHES∗ -- SUMMARY -- INTRODUCTION -- The Budget Control Act and Expiring Tax Provisions -- The Timing of Deficit Reductions -- Long-Term Budget Issues: Overview -- FEDERAL SPENDING AND TAXES: PATTERNS OVER TIME -- Distribution of Spending by Fundamental Economic Form: Government Goods and Services versus Transfers -- Distribution of Spending by Broad Mandatory and Discretionary Categories17 -- Distribution of Spending by Function

For a large number of OECD countries we estimate the cross-country spillover effects of government purchases on output. Following the methodology in Auerbach and Gorodnichenko (2012a, b), we allow these multipliers to vary smoothly according to the state of the economy and use real-time forecast data to purge policy innovations of their predictable components. Our findings suggest that cross-country spillovers have an important impact. The findings also confirm those of our earlier papers--namely that fiscal shocks have a larger impact when the affected country is in recession.

The recent recession has brought fiscal policy back to the forefront, with economists and policy makers struggling to reach a consensus on highly political issues like tax rates and government spending. At the heart of the debate are fiscal multipliers, whose size and sensitivity determine the power of such policies to influence economic growth. Fiscal Policy after the Financial Crisis focuses on the effects of fiscal stimuli and increased government spending, with contributions that consider the measurement of the multiplier effect and its size. In the face of uncertainty over the sustainability of recent economic policies, further contributions to this volume discuss the merits of alternate means of debt reduction through decreased government spending or increased taxes. A final section examines how the short-term political forces driving fiscal policy might be balanced with aspects of the long-term planning governing monetary policy.

The issue of central bank communication on fiscal policy has so far received very little attention in the literature. This article aims to shed light on the determinants of central bank communication on fiscal policy by analysing the intensity of central banks' fiscal communication for five central banks (the Federal Reserve, the ECB, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England and the Swedish Riksbank) over the period 1999-2011. The ECB communicates intensively on fiscal policies, in a normative way. The other central banks emphasise foreign fiscal developments, fiscal policy as input to forecasts, or the use of government debt instruments in monetary policy operations. The empirical analysis indicates that the financial crisis has overall increased the intensity of central bank communication on fiscal policy. The evolution of the government deficit ratio is a driver of the intensity of fiscal communication in the euro area, the US and Japan, and for Sweden since the start of the crisis, while in the UK its intensity is related to government debt developments as of the start of the crisis. [Copyright Elsevier B.V.]

This paper studies the design of optimal fiscal policy when a government that fully trusts the probability model of government expenditures faces a fearful public that forms pessimistic expectations. We identify two forces that shape our results. On the one hand, the government has an incentive to concentrate tax distortions on events that it considers unlikely relative to the pessimistic public. On the other hand, the endogeneity of the public's expectations gives rise to a novel motive for expectation management that aims towards the manipulation of equilibrium prices of government debt in a favorable way. These motives typically act in opposite directions and induce persistence to the optimal allocation and the tax rate.

This paper studies the design of optimal fiscal policy when a government that fully trusts the probability model of government expenditures faces a fearful public that forms pessimistic expectations. We identify two forces that shape our results. On the one hand, the government has an incentive to concentrate tax distortions on events that it considers unlikely relative to the pessimistic public. On the other hand, the endogeneity of the public's expectations gives rise to a novel motive for expectation management that aims towards the manipulation of equilibrium prices of government debt in a favorable way. These motives typically act in opposite directions and induce persistence to the optimal allocation and the tax rate.

While the established literature on central bank communication has traditionally dealt with communication of monetary policy messages to financial markets and the wider public, central bank communication on fiscal policy has so far received little attention. This paper empirically reviews the intensity of central banks' fiscal communication by five central banks (the US Federal Reserve, the ECB, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England and the Swedish Riksbank) over the period 1999-2011. To that end, it develops a fiscal indicator measuring the fiscal-related communication in minutes or introductory statements. Our findings indicate that the ECB communicates intensively on fiscal policies in both positive as well as normative terms. Other central banks more typically refer to fiscal policy when describing foreign developments relevant to domestic macroeconomic developments, when using fiscal policy as input to forecasts, or when referring to the use of government debt instruments in monetary policy operations. The empirical analysis also indicates that the financial crisis has overall increased the intensity of central bank communication on fiscal policy. It identifies the evolution of the government deficit ratio as a driver of the intensity of fiscal communication by central banks in the euro area, the US and Japan, and for Sweden since the start of the crisis. In England the fiscal share in central bank communication is related to developments in government debt as of the start of the crisis.