To make this new case for expectations-driven expansions, Alesina and Ardanga examine twenty-one OECD countries from 1970 to 2007 and select 107 episodes of positive and negative adjustment to make their case. Twenty-six of those episodes qualify as expansionary fiscal adjustments, occurring across nine countries. That is, debts are lower three years out and growth is higher than the seventy-fifth percentile of the average of the set of the observations. This time around, as we saw in the section on the effects of expectations, the results of the econometrics again lack the caveats of their prior piece.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 472