New paper accepted for publication in the International Economic Review

The paper “Fiscal Consolidation Programs and Income Inequality” was accepted for publication at the International Economic Review. The paper is joint work with Francesco Franco, Miguel H. Ferreira, Hans A. Holter and Laurence Malafry.

In this paper, co-authored with Francesco Franco, Miguel A. Ferreira, Hans A. Holter and Laurence Malafry, we document a strong empirical relationship between higher income inequality and stronger recessive impacts of fiscal consolidation episodes across time and space.

To explain this finding, we develop a life‐cycle economy with uninsurable income risk. We calibrate our model to match key characteristics of several European economies, including inequality and fiscal structures, and study the effects of fiscal consolidation programs.

In our model, higher income risk induces precautionary savings behavior, which decreases the proportion of credit‐constrained agents in the economy. These agents have less elastic labor supply responses to fiscal consolidations, which explain the correlation with inequality in the data.

The paper can be accessed here, and a working paper version here.