Fiscal Policy: Financing and Indebtedness
Working Paper 34551
DOI 10.3386/w34551
Issue Date
We conduct a large-scale information randomized controlled trial to study fiscal policy impacts. Surveying approximately 9,000 households across five eurozone countries with varying debt-to-GDP ratios enables a clean cross-country comparison. The key finding is that the fiscal multiplier depends jointly on the financing method and the country’s debt burden: multipliers are smaller in high-debt countries when debt-financed but remain similar across countries when tax-financed. Finally, we develop a New Keynesian model featuring fiscal discipline, which reproduces the empirical patterns observed in the survey and highlights their underlying economic mechanisms.
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Copy CitationJing Cynthia Wu, Shihan Xie, Yinxi Xie, and Ji Zhang, "Fiscal Policy: Financing and Indebtedness," NBER Working Paper 34551 (2025), https://doi.org/10.3386/w34551.Download Citation
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