Non-technical summary 1 Introduction 2 The government budget constraint and the need of fiscal rules 2.1 Standard practice to obtain fiscal closure in large-scale macroeconomic models 2.1.1 The adjusting budgetary item 2.1.2 The functional form and the calibration 3 Identifying endogenous fiscal rules 3.1 Developing intuition via a basic macro model 3.1.1 The model 3.1.2 Characterising the stable manifold of the model 3.1.3 Computing an explicit model-based rule 3.2 Generalisation of the discussion in linear models 3.2.1 Standard stability analysis theory 3.2.2 The identification procedure 4 Application of the identification scheme 4.1 Calibration of the model 4.2 Computation of the explicit model-based rule 5 Conclusions References Figures European Central Bank working paper series