Substitution of debt for taxes as a means of financing a given path of government expenditure would, according to the Ricardian equivalence proposition, have no important real consequences; yet it could, according to the traditional Keynesian view, have desirable countercyclical and growth effects. A reconciliation of these opposing views is not impossible if the author illuminates a source of deviation from the equivalence theorem, which has not been explored so far: the possibility that consumption decisions in each country are affected by the level of its indebtedness, when private agents operate under a debt illusion. The paper finds, within an explicit intertemporal optimization framework, strong empirical support for the debt-illusion hypothesis in a large sample of 52 countries. Copyright 1992 by Scottish Economic Society.
Download Info
To our knowledge, this item is not available for
download. To find whether it is available, there are three
options:
1. Check below under "Related research" whether another version of this item is available online.
2. Check on the provider's web page
whether it is in fact available.
3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be
available.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Christopher F. Baum).
Related research
Keywords:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)