Stability consequences of fiscal policy rules

Jukka Railavo
Additional contact information
Jukka Railavo: Bank of Finland

Macroeconomics from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Using an optimisation-based model with endogenous labour supply and a proportional tax rate, we compare the stabilising properties of different fiscal policy rules. The economy is affected by shocks from both government spending and technology. The fiscal policy rule can be based on government liabilities or the government budget deficit. As both are given as measures of fiscal policy performance in the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), we also use a fiscal policy rule based on the combination of the two. We compare the accounting definition of deficit with the economic definition which takes inflation into account. The fiscal policy rule based on debt, with monetary policy consistent with the Taylor principle, results in an unstable solution. However, a fiscal policy rule based on deficit produces stable solutions with a wide range of fiscal policy parameters. Moreover, we find that putting more weight on the deficit than the debt in the fiscal policy rule creates less cyclical responses to shocks. Finally we find out that the SGP definition of deficit performs as well as the real deficit based on the government budget constraint.

Keywords: inflation; fiscal and monetary policy; stabilisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E31 E52 E61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2004-04-26
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 38
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/mac/papers/0404/0404020.pdf (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:wpa:wuwpma:0404020

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Macroeconomics from University Library of Munich, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by EconWPA ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).