This article introduces a new measure of fiscal policy uncertainty (FPU) based on the disagreement among professional forecasters. We analyse different patterns of this measure for the German economy and also use Italian data for comparison. Especially, we examine the impact of the introduction of the German ‘debt brake’ on FPU. Finally, we conduct an impulse response analysis to investigate the effect of FPU on the real economy and we provide robust evidence that FPU significantly decreases the growth rate of industrial production. The corresponding effect is robust to various sensitivity checks and exceeds the impact of a general measure of economic policy uncertainty. In general, the negative effect on the real economy might be explained by lower hiring and investment by firms, higher costs of financing due to risk premia and lower consumption spending as a result of precautionary savings.

中文翻译：

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财政政策不确定性及其对实体经济的影响：德国证据

本文介绍了一种基于专业预测者之间分歧的财政政策不确定性（FPU）的新度量。我们分析了该指标对德国经济的不同模式，并使用意大利数据进行比较。特别是，我们研究了引入德国“债务刹车”对 FPU 的影响。最后，我们进行了脉冲响应分析以研究 FPU 对实体经济的影响，我们提供了有力的证据表明 FPU 显着降低了工业生产的增长率。相应的影响对各种敏感性检查都是稳健的，并且超过了经济政策不确定性的一般衡量标准的影响。一般来说，对实体经济的负面影响可能是由于公司的招聘和投资减少，