everywhere in S2, by about 40 percent in Canada and Germany, 25 percent in the UK,
and 10 percent in the US and Australia. The standard deviation of net tax shocks (ett
in equation (3)) has also fallen, by between 12 and 50 percent, in the US, the UK and
Germany, while it has increased slightly in Canada and Australia.
One interpretation of these findings is that fiscal management improved in the second
part of the sample. To provide a term of comparison, the decline in the standard
deviation of monetary policy shocks between the pre-1979 period and the post-1983 period43
estimated by Stock and Watson [2002] for the US is about 25 percent in a VAR
à la Christiano, Eichenbaum and Evans [1999] and 25 and 40 percent in two alternative
specifications à la Bernanke and Mihov [1998].
Figures 6 and 7 display the rolling standard deviations of eg
t and ett
(estimated over
windows of 20 quarters), respectively: in all countries except Australia, there is a clear
downward trend over time, and also a rather large discrete decline in the few years around
1980.