Francisco Martí

Fiscal Policies in Spain: Main Stylised Facts Revisited

We provide key stylised facts on fiscal policy developments in Spain over the past three decades using quarterly data (1986Q1-2012Q2). First, we compute stylised facts on the cyclical properties of fiscal policies over that period. Next, we report updated evidence on the macroeconomic effects of non-systematic fiscal policies, including updated estimates of their macroeconomic impact (fiscal multipliers) for alternative datasets. To perform the analysis in the paper we built up a comprehensive database of seasonally adjusted quarterly fiscal variables for the period of interest.

The Output Effects of Tax Changes: Narrative Evidence from Spain

This paper estimates the GDP impact of legislated tax changes in Spain using a newly constructed narrative record for the period 1986-2015. Our baseline estimates suggest that a 1% of GDP increase in exogenous taxes depresses output by around 1.3% after one year, this negative effect fading away at more distant horizons. We also find that the effect of changes in indirect taxes are larger and that, following a tax increase, investment reacts more than consumption. Overall, our set of estimates is consistent with negative output effects triggered by tax increases, yet the quantitative effects are subject to non-negligible uncertainty that is reflected in wide confidence bands, in line with the extant literature for other countries.

Public Finances and Inflation: The Case of Spain

We empirically explore the influence of inflation on fiscal variables in the short, medium and long run, for the case of the Spanish economy, in particular to draw policy lessons for the design of the ongoing process of rebalancing of fiscal accounts. We focus on this topic through the lenses of: (i) the government budget constraint, to assess the influence of inflation on changes in public debt; (ii) accounting decompositions of nominal revenue and expenditure items into their real and price parts; (iii) a large-scale macroeconometric model that contains a detailed fiscal policy block; and (iv) a long-run accounting model on pension expenditure