NBER Publications by Ethan Ilzetzki

A large empirical literature has found that fiscal policy in developing countries is procyclical, in contrast to high-income countries where it is countercyclical. The idea that fiscal policy in developing countries is procyclical has all but reached the status of conventional wisdom. This has sparked a growing theoretical literature that attempts to explain such a puzzle. Some authors, however, have suggested that procyclical fiscal policy could be more fiction than truth since, by and large, the current literature has ignored endogeneity problems and may have simply misidentified a standard expansionary effect of fiscal policy. To settle this issue of causality, we build a novel quarterly dataset for 49 countries covering the period 1960-2006, and subject the data to a battery of econome...