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Liquidity constraints and fiscal multipliers

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Abstract

Although recent studies identified the percentage of constrained agents as the crucial force driving many fiscal policy mechanisms, the values attained were purely the result of model calibrations. We make use of household-level data to estimate the fraction of hand-to-mouth households for several European countries. We calibrate an overlapping generations model with heterogeneous agents to match the net liquid wealth distribution and study the impact of credit constraints on the effectiveness of fiscal consolidation policies. Our findings suggest that the share of hand-to-mouth agents is no longer quantitatively relevant to explain the cross-country heterogeneity in fiscal multipliers when we calibrate the model to match empirically plausible estimates of that share. These results may be driven by the characteristics of the model we employ, which excludes the wealthy hand-to-mouth.

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  • Sá, Diogo, 2022. "Liquidity constraints and fiscal multipliers," MPRA Paper 112132, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:112132
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Liquidity constraints and fiscal multipliers
      by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog on 2022-05-10 04:28:58

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Fiscal Multipliers; Liquidity Constraints; Fiscal Consolidation; Hand-to-Mouth;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • 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

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