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This paper investigates the impact of tax changes on economic activity. We use the narrative record, such as presidential speeches and Congressional reports, to identify the size, timing, and principal motivation for all major postwar tax policy actions. This analysis allows us to separate legislated changes into those taken for reasons related to prospective economic conditions and those taken for more exogenous reasons. The behavior of output following these more exogenous changes indicates that tax increases are highly contractionary. The effects are strongly significant, highly robust, and much larger than those obtained using broader measures of tax changes. (JEL E32, E62, H20, N12) Tax changes have been a major public policy issue in recent years. The tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were passed amid firestorms of debate about their likely effects. Some policymakers claimed that the cuts would both stimulate the economy in the short run and increase normal output in the long run. Others argued that they would raise interest rates and lower confidence and thereby reduce output in both the short run and the long run. That views of the effects of tax changes vary so radically largely reflects the fact that measuring

We search for the circumstances in which the response of national saving to fiscal policy contradicts conventional Keynesian predictions, using data from 18 OECD countries. The data suggest that non-Keynesian effects are associated with large and persistent fiscal impulses. Such responses can be traced to changes in taxes and transfers, more than to changes in government consumption, and are stronger for fiscal contractions than expansions. During large contractions an increase in taxes has no effect on national saving. High or rapidly growing public debt is not a good predictor of non-Keynesian effects. Finally, the composition of the fiscal impulse matters: the non-Keynesian effects of a large fiscal contraction are enhanced when this is carried out primarily by raising taxes.

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this paper we take the case of Sweden in 1994 as a concrete example and try to answer four specic questions. (1) How much would government nances have improved with a higher ination rate? (2) What would the social costs and benets of such a policy have been? (3) What political incentives and power did the government have to increase the ination rate? (4) What measures or reforms would reduce the likelihood that bad public nances promote higher ination? Even though we study a specic country in a specic time period, the four questions we deal with are of much more general interest. Our __The paper is an extended and revised version of a paper written in Swedish for a festschrift for Assar Lindbeck (Persson, Persson and Svensson (1995)). We are grateful to our discussant John Campell and to participants in the conference and in a seminar at Bocconi University for helpful comments

This paper characterizes monetary and exchange-rate policies during successful and unsuccessful fiscal adjustments by analyzing the OECD economies over the period 1970 to 1998. We find that successful adjustments are almost always preceded by large nominal and real exchange rate depreciations while unsuccessful adjustments are preceded by revaluations and followed by depreciations. The extreme adjustments of Ireland and Denmark in the 1990s fit this pattern of depreciation for success very closely. Early depreciation is a significant and quantitatively important predictor of the persistence of adjustment: each 1 percent of depreciation in the two years preceding a fiscal adjustment leads to approximately 2 percent increase in the probability of success. Since the size of the typical pre-adjustment depreciation is 5%, this is an important effect. When compared to an indicator of the composition of the fiscal adjustment, the reliance on spending cuts, the two variables have similar quantitative impacts on the likelihood of persistence. Our results are robust to alternative definitions of the depreciation period, the persistence of the adjustment, and whether we use effective, DM or US$ exchange rates. Monetary policy does not play a significant role in fiscal adjustments. Our results suggest that attaining persistent fiscal adjustment within EMU is likely to become a more "costly" endeavor than it was beforehand, as EMU members have adopted a single currency and therefore abandoned the use of exchange rate policies vis--vis each other. JEL Classification: * We thank Lee Ohanian for comments and Phillip Lane for providing data used in this paper. The usual disclaimer applies. Addresses of authors: Luisa Lambertini, Department of Economics, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095-...

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The possibility of the so called "non-Keynesian " was illustrated by several fiscal episodes in Europe during the last two decades, giving rise to a growing body of both theoretical and empirical literature. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, a simple two period model for private consumption is presented in order to explain the possibility of both Keynesian and non-Keynesian effects of fiscal policy, the main feature being the relation between interest rate and taxes and the existence of rationed consumers. Second, and in order to evaluate the empirical evidence for Europe, panel data models for private consumption are estimated for the EU-15 countries, using annual data over the period 1970 to 1999. The estimation results for the 15 EU countries show some evidence that fiscal policy has the standard Keynesian effects when there are no fiscal adjustments. However, in the presence of fiscal adjustments the traditional Keynesian effects may become non-Keynesian. This reversion occurs basically when the fiscal adjustment is a contractionary one, and is virtually unimportant when the adjustment is a fiscal expansion, revealing therefore some asymmetric consequences of fiscal policy.