Alesina’s expansionary austerity paper was copied nearly verbatim into ECB policy documents

Evidence

As Anis Chowdhury has shown, Alesina’s analysis was cited in the ECOFIN final communiqué and deployed in the rhetoric of Jean Claude Trichet, then president of the ECB; in the UK Treasury’s 2010 emergency budget; and in the discussions of the US Council of Economic Advisors in 2010. And, as noted in chapter 3, it was written more or less word for word into the June 2010 ECB Monthly Bulletin, which cited both of Alesina’s papers and drew directly on Giavazzi and Pagano and related works to make its case for cuts. — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 477

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete evidence of the intellectual-to-policy pipeline Mattei tracks; also connects to chapter 3’s ECB Monthly Bulletin discussion within this same book.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: did the ECB Monthly Bulletin authors cite Alesina fully or selectively cut his caveats and empirical conditions?