Fiscal consolidation programs and income inequality
Brinca, Pedro
Ferreira, Miguel H.
Franco, Francesco
Holter, Hans A.
Malafry, Laurence

Data: 2017
Resum: Following the Great Recession, many European countries implemented fiscal consolidation policies aimed at reducing government debt. Using three independent data sources and three different empirical approaches, we document a strong positive relationship between higher income inequality and stronger recessive impacts of fiscal consolidation programs across time and place. To explain this finding, we develop a life-cycle, overlapping generations economy with uninsurable labour market risk. We calibrate our model to match key characteristics of a number of European economies, including the distribution of wages and wealth, social security, taxes and debt, and study the effects of fiscal consolidation programs. We find that higher income risk induces precautionary savings behaviour, which decreases the proportion of credit-constrained agents in the economy. Credit-constrained agents have less elastic labour supply responses to fiscal consolidation achieved through either tax hikes or public spending cuts, and this explains the relationship between income inequality and the impact of fiscal consolidation programs. Our model produces a cross-country correlation between inequality and the fiscal consolidation multipliers, which is quite similar to that in the data.
Resum: The ADEMU Working Paper Series is being supported by the European Commission Horizon 2020 European Union funding for Research & Innovation, grant agreement No 649396.
Ajuts: European Commission 649396
Drets: Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original. Creative Commons
Llengua: Anglès
Col·lecció: Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. ADEMU working paper series
Col·lecció: ADEMU Working Paper Series ; 78
Document: Working paper
Matèria: Fiscal consolidation ; Income inequality ; Fiscal multipliers ; Public debt ; Income risk

Adreça alternativa: https://hdl.handle.net/10230/33565


60 p, 2.1 MB

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Documents de recerca > Working papers

 Registre creat el 2018-10-23, darrera modificació el 2022-07-09



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