What Drives Fiscal Multipliers? The Role of Private Wealth and Debt

Sebastian Gechert and Rafael Mentges

No 124-2013, IMK Working Paper from IMK at the Hans Boeckler Foundation, Macroeconomic Policy Institute

Abstract: We show that fiscal multiplier estimations may be biased by movements in asset and credit markets, as they facilitate spurious correlations of changes in cyclically adjusted revenues and spending with GDP growth via wrong identifications and an omitted variable bias, thus overstating episodes of expansionary consolidations and downplaying contractionary consolidations. When controlling for asset and credit market movements in otherwise standard approaches to identification, we find multipliers to increase on average by 0.3 to 0.6 units. Consolidations are thus more likely to be contractionary and more harmful to growth than expected by some strands of the existing literature.

Keywords: multiplier effects; fiscal policy; asset markets; credit markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C22 E62 H30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac and nep-pbe
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:imk:wpaper:124-2013

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