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For U.S. annual data that include World War II, the estimated multiplier for temporary defense spending is 0.4—0.5 contemporaneously and 0.6—0.7 over 2 years. If the change in defense spending is \"permanent\" (gauged by Ramey's defense news variable), the multipliers are higher by 0.1—0.2. Since all estimated multipliers are significantly less than 1, greater spending crowds out other components of GDP, particularly investment. The lack of good instruments prevents estimation of reliable multipliers for nondefense purchases; multipliers in the literature of two or more likely reflect reverse causation from GDP to non-defense purchases. Increases in average marginal income tax rates (measured by a newly constructed time series) have significantly negative effects on GDP. When interpreted as a tax multiplier, the magnitude is around 1.1. The combination of the estimated spending and tax multipliers implies that the balanced-budget multiplier for defense spending is negative. We have some evidence that tax changes affect GDP mainly through substitution effects, rather than wealth effects.

Many studies suggest that strict balanced budget rules can restrain sovereign debt and lower sovereign borrowing costs, even if those rules are never enforced in court. Why might public officials adhere to a rule that is practically never enforced in court? Existing literature points to a legal deterrence logic in which the threat of judicial enforcement deters sovereigns from violating the rules in the first place. By contrast, we argue that balanced budget rules work by coordinating decentralized punishment of sovereigns by bond markets, rather than by posing a credible threat of judicial enforcement. Therefore, the clarity of the focal point provided by the rule, rather than the strength of its judicial enforcement mechanisms, determines its effectiveness. We develop a formal model that captures the logic of our argument, and we assess this model using data on U.S. states. We then consider implications of our argument for the impact of the balanced budget rules recently imposed on eurozone states in the Fiscal Compact Treaty.

It has long been demonstrated that in a closed economy a balanced-budget fiscal policy can induce aggregate instability unrelated to economic fundamentals. The empirical relevance of this result has been challenged by many studies. In this paper, we show that such extrinsic instability associated with a balanced-budget rule is a robust phenomenon in a similar closed-economy setting enhanced with endogenous capital utilization. This suggests that the design or operation of a balanced-budget fiscal policy should recognize that it may constitute a potential source of self-fulfilling prophecies and belief-driven fluctuations.

Balanced budget requirements lead to substantial pro-cyclicality in state government spending, with the stringency of a state's rules driving the pace at which it must adjust to shocks. We show that fiscal institutions can generate natural experiments in deficit-financed spending that are informative regarding fiscal stabilization policy. Alternative sources of variation in subnational fiscal policy often implicitly involve \"windfall\" financing, which precludes any effect of future debt or taxation on current consumption and investment. Consistent with a role for these \"Ricardian\" effects, our estimates are smaller than those in related studies, implying an on-impact multiplier below 1.

Balanced budget requirements (BBRs) affect all aspects of financial operations.Previous studies relied on characterizations that highlight a constitutional-statutory distinction.Hou and Smith (Public Budgeting & Finance 26(3): 22-45, 2006) instead propose a political-technical construct. This article uses probit estimation, six measures of balance, and long panels to test which framework offers more explanatory power. The findings suggest that BBRs matter to varying degrees. Technical requirements exert bigger effects than political ones, the effects are more obvious on narrower than broader measures of balance and in the later phases of the budget cycle, and the political-technical construct offers more explanatory power than the constitutional-statutory distinction.

This article adopts the “functional finance” approach to consider the utilization of expansive fiscal policies in the members of the European Monetary Union most affected by high unemployment. As they do not have their own monetary policy, fiscal deficits require the issuing of public debt without the support of the central bank. The authors consequently incorporate the notion of a (partially) balanced-budget expansion to achieve the desired stimulus in gross domestic product (GDP) with the least possible effect on public debt. Their proposal is only a sort of “imperfect” balanced-budget expansion: It is based on the idea that simultaneous increases in public revenue and expenditure can boost GDP, but without any pretension of keeping public deficit unchanged. Specifically, the authors use the case of Spain to show that a more expansive fiscal policy is desirable on economic grounds, and that only institutional constraints prevent it. They do it presenting two alternative scenarios for the coming years and analyzing their different impact on unemployment and fiscal sustainability. The first represents a firm commitment to budget consolidation, whereas the second is based on this “imperfect” application of the balanced budget multiplier. The main conclusion is that a more expansive fiscal policy is perfectly compatible with finance sustainability.

We examine the impact of balanced-budget labor income taxes on the existence of expectation-driven business cycles in a two-sector version of the Schmitt-Grohé and Uribe (SGU) [(1997) Journal of Political Economy 105, 976–1000] model with constant government expenditures and counter-cyclical taxes. Our results show that the destabilizing impact of labor income taxes strongly depends on the capital intensity difference across sectors. Local indeterminacy is indeed more likely when the consumption good sector is capital intensive, as the minimal tax rate decreases, and less likely when the investment good sector is capital intensive, as the minimal tax rate increases. The implication of this result can be quantitatively significant. Indeed, when compared to SGU, local indeterminacy can be either completely ruled out for all OECD countries when the investment good is sufficiently capital intensive or drastically improved, delivering indeterminacy for a larger set of OECD countries, if the consumption good is sufficiently capital intensive. Focusing however on recent estimates of the sectoral capital shares corresponding to the empirically plausible case of a capital intensive consumption good, we find that there is a significant increase of the range of economically relevant labor tax rates (from a minimum tax rate of 30% to 24.7% for which local indeterminacy arises with respect to the aggregate formulation of SGU.

We investigate the role of nonseparable preferences in the occurrence of macroeconomic instability under a balanced-budget rule where government spending is financed by a tax on labor income. Considering a one-sector neoclassical growth model with a large class of nonseparable utility functions, we find that expectations-driven fluctuations occur easily when consumption and labor are Edgeworth substitutes or weak Edgeworth complements. Under these assumptions, an intermediate range of tax rates and a sufficiently low elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption lead to instability.

The Spanish authorities have implemented strongly restrictive fiscal policies with a negative impact on GDP and employment, especially during the recession of 2011–2013. This paper shows that the end of fiscal austerity is feasible for Spain. Adopting a 'functional finance' approach to fiscal policy and making a (partial) use of the idea of Balanced Budget Expansion, we present an alternative fiscal policy for the years 2016-2018 which is not focused on deficit reduction, but on employment creation and on the development of social and structural policies aimed at a real transformation of the Spanish economy. The two main components of this plan are a progressive fiscal reform to increase public revenue over GDP, and a simultaneous increase in the ratio of public expenditure over GDP. With the aid of a three-equation model, this paper proves that an alternative plan to austerity can be not only expansionary but also fully compatible with fiscal sustainability. The choice, then, lies between prioritising either the rate at which unemployment is reduced or at which public deficit is reduced.

It is known that in a real business cycle model with constant returns to scale and a balanced budget fiscal policy rule, steady state indeterminacy may arise due to endogenous labour income tax rates. This article shows that when the government finances its expenditures via an endogenous consumption tax instead, a steady state is always saddle-path stable. Consequently, combining income taxes with consumption taxes makes the ranges of indeterminacy shrink, thus reducing the possibility of aggregate instability. From a policy perspective, the results provide an additional argument in favour of consumption taxes in place of capital taxes.