Correcting “Beyond the Cycle": Accounting for Asset Prices in Structural Fiscal Balances

Estelle Liu, Todd Mattina and Tigran Poghosyan

No 2015/109, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: This paper outlines an operational approach for incorporating the impact of asset price cycles in the calculation of structural fiscal balances (SFBs). The global financial crisis demonstrated that movements in asset prices can have an important fiscal impact. Failing to account for the fiscal impact of asset price cycles can encourage a pro-cyclical policy stance if temporarily high revenues are passed through into expenditures. In addition, over-estimating the SFB may lead to inadequate fiscal buffers when cyclical revenues eventually dissipate. The paper proposes an empirical approach to correct for asset prices and provides illustrative country results for selected OECD countries. We find that asset price cycles are imperfectly synchronized with the business cycle and are quantitatively significant with an average pre-crisis fiscal impact ranging from about ½ to 2 percent of GDP in the sample. For a number of countries, the pre-crisis fiscal impact of high asset prices was larger at about 4 percent of GDP.

Keywords: WP; price cycle; price gap; real asset; structural fiscal balance; financial crisis; asset price; equity market; housing market; panel data econometrics; cycles result; asset price cycle; equity price misalignment; B. measuring asset price cycle; housing price gap; Asset prices; Fiscal stance; Housing prices; Output gap; Business cycles; Global (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36
Date: 2015-05-19
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=42946 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2015/109

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/pubs/ord_info.htm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Akshay Modi ().