The Time for Austerity: Estimating the Average Treatment Effect of Fiscal Policy

Oscar Jorda and Alan Taylor

No 2013-25, Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

Abstract: Elevated government debt levels in advanced economies have risen rapidly as sovereigns absorbed private sector losses and cyclical deficits blew up in the Global Financial Crisis and subsequent slump. A rush to fiscal austerity followed but its justifications and impacts have been heavily debated. Research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates remains unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This paper reconciles seemingly disparate estimates of multipliers within a unified framework. We do this by first evaluating the validity of common identification assumptions used by the literature and find that they are largely violated in the data. Next, we use new propensity score methods for time-series data with local projections to quantify how contractionary austerity really is, especially in economies operating below potential. We find that the adverse effects of austerity may have been understated.

Keywords: Fiscal; policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C54 C99 E32 E62 H20 H5 N10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2013-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (56)

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Related works:
Journal Article: The Time for Austerity: Estimating the Average Treatment Effect of Fiscal Policy (2016)
Working Paper: The time for austerity: Estimating the average treatment effect of fiscal policy (2014)
Working Paper: The Time for Austerity: Estimating the Average Treatment Effect of Fiscal Policy (2013)
Working Paper: The Time for Austerity: Estimating the Average Treatment Effect of Fiscal Policy (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedfwp:2013-25

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DOI: 10.24148/wp2013-25

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