Financial cycles and fiscal multipliers

We show that fiscal multiplier estimations may be biased by movements in asset and credit markets, as they facilitate spurious correlations of changes in cyclically adjusted revenues and spending with output growth via an identification bias and an omitted variable bias, thus overstating episodes of expansionary consolidations and downplaying contractionary consolidations. When controlling for asset and credit market movements in otherwise standard approaches to identification, we find multipliers to increase on average by 0.3–1 units. Fiscal consolidations are thus more likely to be contractionary and more harmful to growth than expected by some strands of the existing literature.