Researchers have used cross-state differences to assess the jobs impact of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the Recovery Act). Existing studies find that the Act's broadly- directed spending (i.e. excluding tax cuts) increased employment, at a cost-per-job of roughly three to...

This paper constructs several models in which, unlike the standard neoclassical growth model, positive news about future technology generates an increase in current consumption, hours and investment. These models are said to exhibit procyclical news shocks. We find that all models that exhibit...

This paper (i) estimates the local effects of government stimulus spending on labor market outcomes and (ii) shows how these effects can be obtained from a firm's optimal policy in the presence of costs to hiring workers. We analyze the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery...

In this paper, we study the effects of interregional spillovers from the government spending component of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the Recovery Act). Using cross-county Census Journey to Work commuting data, we cluster U.S. counties into local labor markets, each of...

There exist sticky price models in which the output response to a government spending change can be large if the central bank is nonresponsive to inflation. According to this “expected inflation channel," government spending drives up expected inflation, which in turn, reduces the real...

This paper analyzes the impact of the education funding component of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the Recovery Act) on public school districts. We use cross- Sectional differences in district-level Recovery Act funding to investigate the program's impact on staffing,...