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In the aftermath of the global financial crisis and great recession, many countries face substantial deficits and growing debts. In the United States, federal government outlays as a ratio to GDP rose substantially from about 19.5 percent before the crisis to over 24 percent after the crisis. In this paper we consider a fiscal consolidation strategy that brings the budget to balance by gradually reducing this spending ratio over time to the level that prevailed prior to the crisis. A crucial issue is the impact of such a consolidation strategy on the economy. We use structural macroeconomic models to estimate this impact focussing primarily on a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with price and wage rigidities and adjustment costs. We separate out the impact of reductions in government purchases and transfers, and we allow for a reduction in both distortionary taxes and government debt relative to the baseline of no consolidation. According to the model simulations GDP rises in the short run upon announcement and implementation of this fiscal consolidation strategy and remains higher than the baseline in the long run. We explore the role of the mix of expenditure cuts and tax reductions as well as gradualism in achieving this policy outcome. Finally, we conduct sensitivity studies regarding the type of model used and its parameterization.
Output gap revisions can be large even after many years. Real-time reliability tests might therefore be sensitive to the choice of the final output gap vintage that the real-time estimates are compared to. This is the case for the Federal Reserve’s output gap. When accounting for revisions in response to the global financial crisis in the final output gap, the improvement in real-time reliability since the mid-1990s is much smaller than found by Edge and Rudd (Review of Economics and Statistics, 2016, 98(4), 785-791). The negative bias of real-time estimates from the 1980s has disappeared, but the size of revisions continues to be as large as the output gap itself.
The authors systematically analyse how the realtime reliability assessment is affected through varying the final output gap vintage. They find that the largest changes are caused by output gap revisions after recessions. Economists revise their models in response to such events, leading to economically important revisions not only for the most recent years, but reaching back up to two decades. This might improve the understanding of past business cycle dynamics, but decreases the reliability of real-time output gaps ex post.
We use a structural VAR model to study the German natural gas market and investigate the impact of the 2022 Russian supply stop on the German economy. Combining conventional and narrative sign restrictions, we find that gas supply and demand shocks have large and persistent price effects, while output effects tend to be moderate. The 2022 natural gas price spike was driven by adverse supply
shocks and positive storage demand shocks, as Germany filled its inventories before the winter. Counterfactual simulations of an embargo on natural gas imports from Russia indicate similar positive price and negative output effects compared to what we observe in the data.
