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The combination of discretionary montetary policy, labor-market distortions and nominal wage rigidity yields an inflation bias as monetary policy tries to exploit nominal wage contracts to address labor-market distortions. Although an inflation target eliminates this inflation bias, it creates a conflict between monetary policy and discretionary fiscal policy if fiscal policy is set at a higher frequency than nominal wages are. To avoid the associated excessive accumulation of public debt, ceilings on public debt are called for. If countries differ substantially in terms of structural distortions or economic shocks, uniform debt ceilings must be complemented by country-specific debt targets in order to prevent decentralised fiscal authorities from employing debt policy strategically.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The District of Columbia has historically faced many challenges due to its unique circumstances and role as the nation's capital. After several years of struggling with financial crises and insolvency in the early 1990s, the District has significantly improved its financial condition by achieving five consecutive balanced budgets, an upgraded bond rating, and unqualified or "clean" opinions on its financial statements. More recently, however, District officials have asserted that the District faces a fiscal structural imbalance as a result of several factors, some stemming from the federal government's presence in the city, the absence of a state to provide funding for the state-like services provided by the District, and restrictions on the District's tax base. The District argues that it faces a fiscal structural imbalance between revenues and its expenditures that undermines its capacity to meet its current responsibilities. In contrast with a cyclical fiscal imbalance caused by temporary economic downturns, the District suggests that its imbalance is longer term and more fundamental and, therefore, structural in nature. The District's estimated measures of fiscal structural imbalance are based on the continuation of current budget policy over a longer term period spanning economic cycles, but do not consider the results of policy alternatives. District officials have cited constraints they face in raising revenues as well as what they assert are unique expenditure responsibilities stemming from the District's position as a federal city that must also provide state-like functions. On the revenue side, unlike state governments, the District is prohibited by federal law from taxing the incomes of nonresidents working in the District. On the spending side, the District officials state that they are uniquely burdened by the responsibilities of a state and by requirements to provide services to the federal establishment. However, the District's estimated costs associated with providing state-like services are not supported by detailed analysis and data, and they are derived from cost allocation formulas largely based on the judgment of District officials. The District received some federal relief through the National Capital and Self-Government Improvement Revitalization Act of 1997, which required the federal government to take over certain services in such areas as criminal justice, transferring their financing from D.C. taxpayers as a whole. In addition, the federal government assumed financial and administrative responsibilities for one of the District's largest fiscal burdens, which it inherited from the federal government as part of the transition to Home Rule in 1973--its unfunded pension liability for vested teachers, police, firefighters, and judges. Also, the federal government's share of the District's Medicaid payments was increased from 50 to 70 percent. Although the District's estimates point to many specific factors, they do not constitute a comprehensive assessment of imbalances between expenditures and revenue capacity. The District has not performed the analysis to determine whether it has the capacity to provide a level of services comparable to those provided by other cities with similar needs and costs. As a practical matter, such an analysis is key to determining the presence of an underlying structural imbalance in the District's finances."

This paper examines the effects of fiscal policy measures on GDP and the government budget balance in a structural VAR model. In order to identify expenditure shocks we follow Blachard/Perotti (2002) and assume that government expenditure is partly predetermined in the budget. For the identification of tax policy shocks we exploit changes in tax law in Germany between 1967 and 2008. Our results support significant short term effects of fiscal expansionary policies. In the medium term, however, the model predicts substantial increases in government debt. Applying the model to the recent stimulus programmes in Germany, we find that the stimulus programme had substantial effect on output in the short run.

This Working Paper presents an overview of structural budget balance models and the adjustments most relevant for Australia. Three models (the OECD model, the IMF model and Treasury's previously published model in the Australian Government's 2009-10 Budget and McDonald et al (2010)) are discussed. Updated estimates of the Australian Government's structural budget balance are presented alongside analysis showing the sensitivity of the results to plausible changes in key parameters. The updated structural budget balance estimates are based on the model used by McDonald et al (2010) and updated for the Australian Government's 2013-14 Budget.

Doutoramento em Economia ; Considerable uncertainty surrounds the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy. The re-search presented in this dissertation firstly aims at improving on the methods used to measure such effects - which feature vector autoregressions (VARs) as the basic tool. The investigation is partly carried out using structural VARs. The methodological innova¬tions in that part concern the joint identification of fiscal shocks vis-a-vis monetary policy shocks and the estimation of a model with time-varying parameters using a non-recursive identification scheme. I also use reduced-form VARs to assess the effects of a novel shock measure, derived from budget forecasts, that is arguably free of anticipatory movements. The second aim of the dissertation is to present empirical results for the US, focusing on the way the impacts of the government budget on the economy have changed over time. The thesis is divided into three essays. In the first one, I present evidence that taxes and transfers were the most important force attenuating the severity of recessions up to the eighties, surpassing the role of monetary policy. Fiscal policy has, however, become less effective in stimulating output in the course of the last decades. The findings in the second and the third essays corroborate this conclusion. Such a change in effectiveness is particularly marked for the shock measure that is relatively unaffected by anticipation, which features multipliers with non-conventional signs in the recent period. In general, these findings call for more research on the factors that intervene in the transmission mechanism of fiscal policy and can bring about important variation in its impacts.