IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/gmf/papers/2017-11.html

Fiscal Consolidation Programs and Income Inequality

Author

Listed:
  • Pedro Brinca

    (Nova School of Business and Economics, Universidade Nova de Lisboa
    Center for Economics and Finance, Universidade do Porto)

  • Miguel H. Ferreira

    (Nova School of Business and Economics, Universidade Nova de Lisboa)

  • Francesco Franco

    (Nova School of Business and Economics, Universidade Nova de Lisboa)

  • Hans A. Holter

    (Department of Economics, University of Oslo)

  • Laurence Malafry

    (Department of Economics, Stockholm University)

Abstract

Following the Great Recession, many European countries implemented fiscal consolidation policies aimed at reducing government debt. Using three independent data sources and three different empirical approaches, we document a strong positive relationship between higher income inequality and stronger recessive impacts of fiscal consolidation programs across time and place. To explain this finding, we develop a life-cycle, overlapping generations economy with uninsurable labor market risk. We calibrate our model to match key characteristics of a number of European economies, including the distribution of wages and wealth, social security, taxes and debt, and study the effects of fiscal consolidation programs. We find that higher income risk induces precautionary savings behavior, which decreases the proportion of credit-constrained agents in the economy. Credit-constrained agents have less elastic labor supply responses to fiscal consolidation achieved through either tax hikes or public spending cuts, and this explains the relationship between income inequality and the impact of fiscal consolidation programs. Our model produces a cross-country correlation between inequality and the fiscal consolidation multipliers, which is quite similar to that in the data.

Suggested Citation

  • Pedro Brinca & Miguel H. Ferreira & Francesco Franco & Hans A. Holter & Laurence Malafry, 2017. "Fiscal Consolidation Programs and Income Inequality," CeBER Working Papers 2017-11, Centre for Business and Economics Research (CeBER), University of Coimbra.
    • Handle: RePEc:gmf:papers:2017-11
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://bee.fe.uc.pt/working-paper/pdf/4422b1a662cd4564ba3846df2f806dda/wp_11.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • E62 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Fiscal Policy; Modern Monetary Theory
    • H31 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - Household
    • H50 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gmf:papers:2017-11. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sofia Antunes (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cebucpt.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.