---
title: Fiscal Policy
description: Fiscal policy examines how governments use taxation and spending to influence economic activity. Learners will analyze the impact of budget deficits, tax reforms, and government spending on inflation, employment, and overall national economic growth.
category: finance-economics
subcategory: economics-(social-lens)
difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced
url: /subject/fiscal-policy
---

# Fiscal Policy

Fiscal policy examines how governments use taxation and spending to influence economic activity. Learners will analyze the impact of budget deficits, tax reforms, and government spending on inflation, employment, and overall national economic growth.

## Available Resources

1 Videos • 1 Books • 3 Websites • 1 Papers

## Papers

### 1. Ten Years after the Financial Crisis: What Have We Learned from the Renaissance in Fiscal Research?

**Author:** Valerie A. Ramey

Survey of a decade of empirical work on fiscal multipliers, comparing the main identification strategies and their weaknesses, and concluding that spending multipliers cluster between 0.6 and 1. Free PDF from the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

**Difficulty:** Advanced | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.33.2.89

**Tags:** fiscal-multipliers, government-spending, fiscal-policy, empirical-macroeconomics, causal-identification

## Books

### 1. Fiscal Policy under Low Interest Rates

**Author:** Olivier Blanchard

Blanchard argues that persistently low interest rates lower both the fiscal cost and the welfare cost of public debt, working through debt-sustainability arithmetic, optimal deficits, and case studies of post-crisis austerity, Japan, and the US. Free open-access edition.

**Difficulty:** Advanced | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid

**Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262544873?tag=edmonddante07-20

**Tags:** public-debt, interest-rates, debt-sustainability, fiscal-policy, macroeconomics

## Websites

### 1. IMF Fiscal Monitor

Twice-yearly report from the IMF's Fiscal Affairs Department on global public finances: deficit and debt projections for most countries plus a thematic chapter on issues such as debt sustainability, fiscal rules, or spending pressures. Free PDFs and datasets.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/FM

**Tags:** public-finance, government-debt, fiscal-policy, imf, macroeconomic-data

### 2. CBO: Outlook for the Budget and the Economy

The Congressional Budget Office's hub for its Budget and Economic Outlook reports, which project federal spending, revenues, deficits and debt over a ten-year window and document the modelling assumptions behind them. Nonpartisan by statute and updated several times yearly.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://www.cbo.gov/topics/budget/outlook-budget-and-economy

**Tags:** federal-budget, budget-projections, deficits, us-fiscal-policy, cbo

### 3. Tax Policy Center Briefing Book

A reference of short sourced explainers on how US federal taxes and the budget process actually work: revenue sources, deficits, tax expenditures, and distributional effects, maintained by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and updated as law changes.

**Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book

**Tags:** us-taxes, tax-policy, federal-budget, tax-expenditures, public-finance

## Videos

### 1. Fiscal Policy (Principles of Macroeconomics unit)

**Author:** Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok

An eleven-video sequence from Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok covering expansionary and contractionary fiscal policy, the multiplier, crowding out, automatic stabilizers, and why timing and targeting limit real-world stimulus. Whiteboard animation with practice questions.

**Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://mru.org/courses/principles-economics-macroeconomics/intro-fiscal-policy

**Tags:** fiscal-policy, fiscal-multiplier, crowding-out, automatic-stabilizers, macroeconomics

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