A law issued to allocate reconstruction grants following the 2009 "Aquilano" earthquake has resulted in a large and unanticipated discontinuity across municipalities with comparable damages. Using diff-in-diff analysis we estimate the "local spending" and the "local tax" multipliers--according...

For G-7 countries over the period 1961-1990, there appears to be a strong and stable negative correlation between annual changes in the current account and investment. Here we explore this correlation using a highly tractable empirical model that distinguishes between global and country-specific...

This paper utilizes frequency-domain techniques to identify and characterize economically important properties of government spending. Using post-war data for the United States, the paper first identifies peaks in the estimated spectra of the major components of fiscal spending. Second, the...

This paper investigates industry-level effects of government purchases in order to shed light on the transmission mechanism for government spending on the aggregate economy. We begin by highlighting the different theoretical predictions concerning the effects of government spending on industry...

This paper uses news reports about two deficit-reduction laws of the past decade to identify days when expected fiscal policy clearly became more or less expansionary. The paper also proposes a technique for identifying whether the real interest rate increased or decreased on those days, based...

Contrary to simple theoretical predictions, previous empirical research has found that state government public spending is increased far more, often dollar-for-dollar, by federal grant receipts than by equivalent increases in constituent private income. This anomaly has come to be known as the...

This paper surveys the literature on the macroeconomic effects of government debt. It begins by discussing the data on debt and deficits, including the historical time series, measurement issues, and projections of future fiscal policy. The paper then presents the conventional theory of...

We re-examine the optimality of tax smoothing from the point of view of frictional labor markets. Our central result is that whether or not this cornerstone optimal fiscal policy prescription carries over to an environment with labor market frictions depends crucially on the cyclical nature of...