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The paper presents empirical evidence on the international effects of US fiscal policy from structural vector autoregressions identified through external instruments in a panel setting for the G7 countries. An exogenous increase in US government spending is estimated to produce sizeable positive responses of output and consumption in the rest of the G7 countries, both about half as large as their domestic US counterparts, while strongly depreciating the US terms of trade and lowering short-run real interest rates. Moreover, fiscal shocks are estimated to have a strongly positive impact on hourly labor productivity in the private sector. We solve a two-country New Keynesian model in closed form and show that a low cost elasticity of varying technology utilization can simultaneously explain the positive productivity, consumption and international spillover effects as well as the real depreciation resulting from expansionary US government spending shocks.

We present evidence on the open economy consequences of US fiscal policy shocks identified through proxy-instrumental variables. Tax shocks and government spending shocks that raise the government budget deficit lead to persistent current account deficits. In particular, the negative response of the current account to exogenous tax reductions through a surge in the demand for imports is among the strongest and most precisely estimated effects. Moreover, we find that the reduction of the current account is amplified when the tax reduction is due to lower personal income taxes and when the government increases its consumption expenditures. Historically, a much larger share of current account dynamics has been due to tax shocks than to government spending shocks.

We present evidence on the open economy consequences of US fiscal policy shocks identified through proxy-instrumental variables. Tax shocks and government spending shocks that raise the government budget deficit lead to persistent current account deficits. In particular, the negative response of the current account to exogenous tax reductions through a surge in the demand for imports is among the strongest and most precisely estimated effects. Moreover, we find that the reduction of the current account is amplified when the tax reduction is due to lower personal income taxes and when the government increases its consumption expenditures. Historically, a much larger share of current account dynamics has been due to tax shocks than to government spending shocks.

We estimate the effect of government spending shocks on the US economy with a time-varying parameter vector autoregression. The recent Great Recession period appears to be characterized by uniquely large impulse responses of output to fiscal shocks. Moreover, the particularity of this period is underlined by highly unusual responses of several other variables. The pattern of fiscal shock responses neither completely fits the predictions of the New Keynesian model of an economy subject to the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates, nor does it suggest regular variation of fiscal policy effects depending on the state of the business cycle. Rather, the Great Recession period seems special in that government spending shocks had a strongly negative effect on the spread between corporate and government bond yields and a strongly positive effect on consumer confidence and private consumption spending.

We use quantile regression methods to estimate the effects of government spending shocks on output and unemployment rates. This allows to uncover nonlinear effects of fiscal policy by letting the parameters of either vector autoregressive models or local projection regressions vary across the distribution of macroeconomic activity. In quarterly US data, we find that fiscal output multipliers are notably larger if GDP is predicted to be below trend. Conversely, higher government spending appears to significantly lower unemployment only if the unemployment rate is in the largest deciles of its conditional distribution.

AbstractWe show that in New Keynesian models with non‐neutral government debt, the Taylor principle ceases to be relevant for equilibrium determinacy if the government follows a fiscal rule of levying taxes in proportion to its interest payments on existing debt. This is in contrast with previous studies, which typically have assumed that taxes respond to the level of debt, and have found either a confirmation or reversal of the Taylor principle depending on the feedback from debt to taxes. We find, instead, that the equilibrium effect of the interest rate on debt is crucial for determinacy. If, as in our model, taxes are raised in response to debt interest payments, the range of indeterminacy monotonically decreases with the fiscal feedback parameter. When interest payments are completely tax‐financed, indeterminacy is ruled out without any restrictions on monetary policy.