02180cas a2200241 a 4500 AALejournalIMF018421 230101c9999 xx r poo 0 0eng d 5.00 USD 9781484352762 1018-5941 BD-DhAAL BD-DhAAL Ruzzante, Matteo. Financial Crises, Macroeconomic Shocks, and the Government Balance Sheet : A Panel Analysis / Matteo Ruzzante. Washington, D.C. : International Monetary Fund, 2018. 1 online resource (55 pages) IMF Working Papers <strong>Off-Campus Access:</strong> No User ID or Password Required <strong>On-Campus Access:</strong> No User ID or Password Required Electronic access restricted to authorized BRAC University faculty, staff and students Government financial assets are increasingly recognized as playing an important role in assessing fiscal sustainability. However, very little research has been done on the dynamics of government financial assets compared to liabilities. In this paper, we investigate the impact of recent financial crises and macroeconomic shocks on government balance sheets, decomposing the separate effects on financial assets and liabilities. Using quarterly Government Finance Statistics (GFS) data, we analyze a panel of 27 countries over the period 1999Q1-2017Q1 through fixed effects and panel VAR techniques. Financial crises are shown to deteriorate the net financial worth of governments, but no significant impact is found on assets suggesting that they are not being used as fiscal buffers in bad times. On the contrary, countries that suffered both financial and banking crises experienced an 'artificial' increase of their asset position through bank bailouts. Macroeconomic shock analyses reveal that government balance sheet items are countercyclical, but important asymmetries are found in their dynamics. Mode of access: Internet IMF Working Papers; Working Paper ; No. 2018/093 Full text available on IMF http://elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/2018/093/001.2018.issue-093-en.xml IMF e-Library