Recent fiscal policies, including the 2008 stimulus payments and the 2009 Making Work Pay tax credit, aimed to increase household spending. This paper quantifies the spending response to these policies and examines differences in spending by whether the stimulus was delivered as a one-time...

In 2001, many households received rebate checks as advanced payments of the benefit of the new, 10 percent federal income tax bracket. A survey conducted at the time the rebates were mailed finds that few households said that the rebate led them mostly to increase spending. A follow-up survey in...

Many households received income tax rebates in 2001 of $300 or $600. These rebates represented advance payments of the tax cut from the new 10 percent tax bracket. Based on a survey of a representative sample of households, this paper finds that only 22 percent of households receiving the rebate...

In 1992, the income tax withholding tables were adjusted so that withholding was reduced. A typical worker received an extra $28.80 in take-home pay per month in March through December 1992, to be offset by a lower tax refund in 1993. The change in withholding amounted to 0.5 percent of GDP....

Balance-sheet repair drove the response of a significant fraction of households to fiscal stimulus following the Great Recession. By combining survey, behavioral, and time-series evidence on the 2011 payroll tax cut and its expiration in 2013, this papers identifies and analyzes households who...

Measured productivity is strongly procyclical. Real business cycle theories suggest that actual fluctuations in productivity are the source of fluctuations in aggregate output. Keynesian theories maintain that fluctuations in aggregate output come from shocks to aggregate demand. Keynesian...

Supply shocks played an important role in macroeconomic fluctuations during the 1970's. Supply shocks are also increasingly important in Keynesian and neo-classical models of the business cycle. This paper is a short survey of these theoretical models. It also discusses the history of supply...

A firm may acquire additional caoital input by purchasing new capital or by increasing the utilization of its current capital. The margin between capital accumulation and capital utilization is studied in a model of dynamic factor demand where the firm chooses capital, labor, and their rates of...

A model of the dynamically interrelated demand for capital and labor is specified and estimated. The estimates are of the first-order conditions of the firm's problem rather than of the closed-form decision rules. This use of the first-order conditions allows a random rate of return and a...

Romer and Romer (1989,1990,1992) identify dates where the Federal Reserve appears to have shifted its policy towards reducing the rate of inflation. This paper examines the economic context that drives this decision. It finds that the Fed appears to weigh the outlook for unemployment as well as...