Congregado Ramírez de Aguilera, EmilioEsteve, VicentePrats Albentosa, María Asunción2025-06-112025-06-112024Congregado, E., Esteve, V. & Prats, M.A. (2024). Optimal public deficit and tax-smoothing in the Spanish economy,1850-2022. In Documentos de Trabajo (W.P. 1). Instituto Universitario de análisis Económico y Social, Universidad de Alcalá.2172-7856https://hdl.handle.net/10272/25658In this paper, we provide a formal test of Barro s tax-smoothing model, using Spanish data covering the period 1850 2022. First, we found that the tax-tilting component has been very important for the Spanish government and is a symptom of the existence of a public de cit bias that has existed in Spanish public nances over the sample period. Second, our empirical ndings do also support the existence of tax-smoothing in Spanish scal policy throughout the sample period. Consequently, there is some evidence that the Spanish economy has engaged in tax-smoothing behavior over the period analyzed, as the Spanish governments responded to expected future changes in government spending by running budget imbalances, rather than altering contemporaneous government revenues.engAtribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 3.0 Españahttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/Optimal taxationPublic debt managementTax-smoothingTax-tiltingSpainworking paperopen access53 Ciencias Económicas