The DOI matches its Crossref record.
The Sustainability of Fiscal Policy in the United States
Open accessAbstract
The paper examines the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy, finding substantial evidence in favor. I summarize the U.S. fiscal record from 1792-2003, critically review sustainability conditions and their testable implications, and apply them to U.S. data. I particularly emphasize the ramifications of economic growth. A "growth dividend" has historically covered the entire interest bill on the U.S. debt. Unit root tests on real series, unscaled by GDP, are distorted by the series' severe heteroskedasticity. The most credible evidence in favor of sustainability is the robust positive response of primary surpluses to fluctuations in the debt-GDP ratio.
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Citations
Cited by
Population aging and fiscal sustainability: Nonlinear evidence from Europe
Cho, D., & Lee, K.-W. (2022) · Journal of International Money and Finance · doi:10.1016/j.jimonfin.2022.102665 · Cited by 40
Impact of population ageing on fiscal balance in the European Union
Filipović, S., & Miljković, M. (2024) · Stanovništvo · doi:10.59954/stnv.648 · Cited by 3
Metadata
- Authors
- Bohn, H.
- Venue
- SSRN Electronic Journal
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2005
- ISSN
- 1556-5068 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3121200830
- Cited by
- 272
- References
- 0
- Type
- posted content
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Sustainability of Fiscal Policy in the United States. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2139/ssrn.708173
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- Bohn, H. (2005). The Sustainability of Fiscal Policy in the United States. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.708173
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
