Monetary policy is often considered the preferred tool to stabilize business cycles because it can be implemented swiftly and because it does not rely on large fiscal multipliers. However, when the effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates limits the ammunition of conventional monetary policy, alternative policy measures are needed. Enter unconventional fiscal policy, which often uses changes in taxes—in this case, value-added taxes—to influence spending.
Booth’s Michael Weber and colleagues previously investigated unconventional fiscal policy in a 2018 paper (See Research Brief). This new paper analyzes the unexpected announcement of the German federal government on June 3rd, 2020, to temporarily cut the value added tax (VAT) rate by 3 percentage points. The law was in effect from July 1, 2020, through December 31, 2020.
Employing survey methods to address empirical challenges pertaining to consumers’ awareness of the tax changes and, hence, how those changes affected spending (retrospectively perceived pass-through of the VAT cut), the authors find the following:
This last finding, regarding a VAT cut’s simplicity, contrasts with unconventional monetary policy, which often relies on consumer sophistication.
While the authors take no policy stance on monetary vs. fiscal unconventional policies, they do stress the significance of their findings for policymakers: An unexpected temporary VAT cut operates like conventional monetary policy and can be an effective stabilization tool when unconventional monetary policy, like forward guidance, might be less effective.