Afonso, AntónioGrüner, Hans PeterKolerus, Christina2010-10-042010-10-042010Afonso, António, Hans Peter Grüner e Christina Kolerus. 2010. "Fiscal policy and growth: do financial crises make a difference?". Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão - DE Working papers nº 10-2010/DE/UECE0874-4548http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/2320In this paper we assess to what extent in the existence of a financial crisis, government spending can contribute to mitigate economic downturns in the short run and whether such impact differs in crisis and non crisis times. We use panel analysis for a set of OECD and non-OECD countries for the period 1981-2007. The fiscal multiplier for the full sample for instrumented regular and crisis spending is about 0.6-0.8 considering the sample average government spending share of GDP of about one third. Altogether, we cannot reject the hypothesis that crisis spending and regular spending have the same impact using a variation of controls, sub-samples and specifications.engFiscal PolicyFinancial CrisisGrowthOECDEUPanel Analysisworking paper