What is the relation between infrequent price adjustment and the dynamic response of the aggregate price level to monetary shocks? The answer to this question ranges from a one-to-one link (Calvo, 1983) to no connection whatsoever (Caplin and Spulber, 1987). The purpose of this paper is to...

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of fiscal policy by studying, using household-level data, how households respond to shifts in government spending. Our identification strategy allows us to control for time-specific aggregate effects, such as the stance of monetary policy or the...

This paper shows how the richer frequency and variety of fiscal policy shocks available in an international sample can be analyzed recognizing the heterogeneity that exists across different countries. The main conclusion of our empirical analysis is that the question "what is the fiscal policy...

The sensitivity of U.S. aggregate investment to shocks is procyclical: the initial response increases by approximately 50% from the trough to the peak of the business cycle. This feature of the data follows naturally from a DSGE model with lumpy microeconomic capital adjustment. Beyond...

Most economists and observers place the lack of fiscal discipline at the core of the recent Argentine crisis. This begs the question of how countries like Belgium or Italy (pre-Maastricht) could run large fiscal deficits and accumulate debts far beyond those of Argentina, without experiencing...

Several recent studies suggest that the response of national saving to fiscal policy may be non-linear. In this paper we use two data sets to search for the circumstances in which such non-linear responses may arise: a sample of OECD countries used in previous studies, and sample of developing...

A shift in taxes or in government spending (a "fiscal shock") at some point in time puts a constraint on the path of taxes and spending in the future, since the government intertemporal budget constraint will eventually have to be met. This simple fact is surprisingly overlooked in analyses of...

We use the time series of shifts in U.S. Federal tax liabilities constructed by Romer and Romer to estimate tax multipliers. Differently from the single-equation approach adopted by Romer and Romer, our estimation strategy (a Var that includes output, government spending and revenues, inflation...

Data revisions and the availability of a longer sample offer the opportunity to reconsider the empirical findings that suggest that in the OECD countries national saving responds non-monotonically to fiscal policy. The paper confirms that the circumstance most likely to give rise to a...

The global economy has a chronic shortage of safe assets which lies behind many recent macroeconomic imbalances. This paper provides a simple model of the Safe Asset Mechanism (SAM), its recessionary safety traps, and its policy antidotes. Safety traps share many common features with...