This paper was presented at the Fiscal Rules Roundtable hosted by the Institute for Fiscal Studies on 21 May 2014. This roundtable was attended by stakeholders from HM Treasury, the Office for Budget Responsibility, the private sector and academic researchers. Simon Wren-Lewis also presented conclusions from his recent work on the design of fiscal rules.

This event forms part of a programme of work funded by the ESRC entitled "Combining micro- and macro- economic approaches to fiscal policy evaluation", which is conducted jointly by the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at IFS and the ESRC Centre for Macroeconomics.