Fiscal policy after the Great Recession

May 12, 2011
Albert Alesina, BSE Lecture

"Fiscal policy after the Great Recession"

On Thursday evening, Prof. Albert Alesina (Harvard University) presented the 21st BSE Lecture, "Fiscal policy after the Great Recession," at Banc Sabadell Auditorium in Barcelona. In his presentation, Prof. Alesina led the audience through his research findings on the effects of fiscal adjustments. Analysis of data from 21 OECD countries that made adjustments between 1970 and today led him to qualify the conventional wisdom that fiscal adjustments lead to recessions.

Read summary of BSE Lecture by Alberto Alesina

View lecture slides

About our speaker

Alberto Alesina (Harvard University) is a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Center for Economic Policy Research. He is a leader in the field of Political Economics and published several books on the subject including The Future of Europe: Reform or Decline (MIT Press, 2006) and Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference (Oxford University Press, 2005). He is a co-editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics and has held visiting positions at MIT, Tel Aviv University, University of Stockholm, The World Bank, and the IMF.