Identifying fiscal multipliers is usually constrained by the absence of a counterfactual scenario. Our new data set allows overcoming this problem by making use of the fact that recommendations under the EU’s excessive deficit procedure (EDP) provide both a baseline no-policy-change scenario and a fiscal-adjustment EDP scenario that entails a forecast of the macroeconomic impact of fiscal consolidation over the EDP horizon. For a sample of 24 EU countries to which 48 EDP recommendations were applied between 2009 and 2015, we derive country-specific fiscal multipliers as actually applied by forecasters during the crisis. Our results confirm Blanchard and Leigh’s (2013, 2014) presumption that forecasters learned during the crisis. According to our findings, fiscal multipliers as applied by the European Commission increased over time – from about 1/4 in the early years of the crisis to about 2/3 in the later years. However, different from Blanchard and Leigh (2013, 2014), we do not find evidence for the hypothesis that ex-post fiscal multipliers have been substantially above 1 during the crisis. JEL Classification: E32, E62, H20, H5

中文翻译：

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了解欧洲主权债务危机期间的财政乘数：一项准自然实验的证据

确定财政乘数通常受制于缺乏反事实的情况。我们的新数据集可以利用以下事实来克服这一问题：欧盟过度赤字程序（EDP）下的建议既提供了基准无政策变更方案，又提供了对宏观经济影响进行预测的财政调整EDP方案在EDP范围内的财政合并。对于在2009年至2015年之间应用了48个EDP建议的24个欧盟国家的样本，我们得出了危机期间预报员实际应用的针对特定国家的财政乘数。我们的结果证实了Blanchard和Leigh（2013，2014）的预测，这是预测员在危机期间学到的。根据我们的发现，欧盟委员会采用的财政乘数随着时间的流逝而增加，从危机初期的约1/4增加到后期的约2/3。但是，与Blanchard和Leigh（2013，2014）不同，我们没有找到证据证明危机后事后财政乘数已大大高于1。JEL分类：E32，E62，H20，H5