Fiscal multipliers and foreign holdings of public debt

Fernando Broner, Daragh Clancy, Alberto Martin and Aitor Erce

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: This paper explores a natural connection between fiscal multipliers and foreign holdings of public debt. Although fiscal expansions can raise domestic economic activity through various channels, they can also have crowding-out effects if the resources used to acquire public debt reduce domestic consumption and investment. Thus, these crowding-out effects are likely to be weaker when public debt is purchased by foreigners. We test this hypothesis on (i) post-war US data and (ii) data for a panel of 17 advanced economies from the 1980’s to the present. To do so, we assemble a novel database of public debt holdings by domestic and foreign creditors for a large set of advanced economies. We combine this data with standard measures of fiscal policy shocks and show that, indeed, the size of fiscal multipliers is increasing in the share of public debt held by foreigners. In particular, the fiscal multiplier is smaller than one when the foreign share is low, such as in the U.S. in the 1950’s and 1960’s and Japan today, and larger than one when the foreign share is high, such as in the U.S. and Ireland today

Keywords: sovereign debt; fiscal multiplier; foreign holdings of public debt (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E62 F32 F34 F36 F41 F62 F65 G15 H63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-12, Revised 2021-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-opm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Fiscal Multipliers and Foreign Holdings of Public Debt (2022)
Working Paper: Fiscal multipliers and foreign holdings of public debt (2019)
Working Paper: Fiscal Multipliers and Foreign Holdings of Public Debt (2018)
Working Paper: Fiscal Multipliers and Foreign Holdings of Public Debt (2018)
Working Paper: Fiscal multipliers and foreign holdings of public debt (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:upf:upfgen:1610

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