Abstract: We introduce a measure of a government's fiscal position that exploits cointegrating relationships among fiscal variables. The measure is a loglinear combination of tax revenue, government spending and the market value of government debt that---unlike the debt-GDP ratio---appears stationary in long historical data from the US and the UK and in postwar data from these and 14 other developed countries. The fiscal position must forecast either government debt returns or fiscal adjustment (a combination of high tax growth and low spending growth), or both. We find that fiscal adjustment, particularly through changes in spending, is the empirically relevant channel.
CICF Best Paper Award 2025.
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Conferences: CEPR workshop on modelling of fiscal policy 2025, EFA 2025, SFI Research day 2025, CICF 2025, SAIF Annual Research Conference 2025, Turin Macro-Finance Workshop 2025, Adam-Smith Workshop 2025, CEPR Paris Symposium 2024, Macro-Finance Society 2024 Oslo, NBER Summer Institute 2023
Seminars: LIF-SAFE Frankfurt, NHH School of Economics, University of Lugano (USI), BIS, University of Cambridge, SFI brown bag, SSE, University of Hamburg, University of St. Gallen, Collegio Carlo Alberto, ESCP Business School, HSG-SoF Research Day 2024, Fulcrum Asset Management, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (GZ), Copenhagen Business School, University of Washington, London School of Economics, Harvard.