H3 - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents
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Labor Demand Response to Labor Supply Incentives: Lessons from the German Mini-Job Reform
How do firms change their employment decisions when tax benefits for low-earning workers are expanded? Some firms increase employment overall, whereas others replace high-earning workers with low-earning workers, according to German linked employer-employee data. -
Child Skill Production: Accounting for Parental and Market-Based Time and Goods Investments
Can daycare replace parents’ time spent with children? We explore this by using data on how parents spend time and money on children and how this spending is related to their child’s development. -
Sources of Borrowing and Fiscal Multipliers
This paper finds that debt-financed government spending multipliers vary considerably depending on the location of the debt buyer. In a sample of 33 countries, we find that government spending multipliers are larger when government purchases are financed by issuing debt to foreign investors (non-residents), compared with when government purchases are financed by issuing debt to home investors (residents). -
Debt Overhang and Deleveraging in the US Household Sector: Gauging the Impact on Consumption
Using a novel dataset for the US states, this paper examines whether household debt and the protracted debt deleveraging help explain the dismal performance of US consumption since 2007, in the aftermath of the housing bubble. -
Uncertain Fiscal Consolidations
The paper explores the macroeconomic consequences of fiscal consolidations whose timing and composition - either tax- or spending-based - are uncertain. -
February 23, 2012
Household Borrowing and Spending in Canada
Understanding how much of the increased debt load of Canadian households has been used to finance household spending on consumption and home renovation is important for the conduct of monetary policy. In this article, the authors use a comprehensive data set that provides information on the uses of debt by Canadian households. They first present some facts regarding the evolution of Canadian household debt over the period from 1999 to 2010, emphasizing the increased importance of debt flows that are secured by housing. They then explore how Canadian households have used their borrowed funds over the same period, and assess the role of these borrowed funds in financing total consumption and spending on home renovation. Finally, they examine the possible effects of a decline in house prices on consumption when housing equity is used as collateral against household indebtedness. -
Sovereign Default Risk Premia, Fiscal Limits and Fiscal Policy
We develop a closed economy model to study the interactions among sovereign risk premia, fiscal limits, and fiscal policy. The stochastic fiscal limits, which measure the ability and willingness of the government to service its debt, arise endogenously from a dynamic Laffer curve. -
On Fiscal Multipliers: Estimates from a Medium Scale DSGE Model
This paper contributes to the debate on fiscal multipliers, in the context of a structural model. I estimate a micro-founded dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, that features a rich fiscal policy block and a transmission mechanism for government spending shocks, using Bayesian techniques for US data. -
Trends in U.S. Hours and the Labor Wedge
From 1980 until 2007, U.S. average hours worked increased by thirteen percent, due to a large increase in female hours. At the same time, the U.S. labor wedge, measured as the discrepancy between a representative household's marginal rate of substitution between consumption and leisure and the marginal product of labor, declined substantially.