Empirical estimates of the impact of government spending shocks disagree on central issues such as the size of output multipliers and the responses of consumption and the real wage. One explanation for the disagreement is that fiscal shocks are often anticipated. Due to misspecification of the...

This paper estimates the dynamic effects of changes in taxes in the United States. We distinguish between the effects of changes in personal and corporate income taxes using a new narrative account of federal tax liability changes in these two tax components. We develop an estimator in which...

Existing empirical estimates of US nationwide tax multipliers vary from close to zero to very large. Using narrative measures as proxies for structural shocks to total tax revenues in an SVAR, we estimate tax multipliers at the higher end of the range: around two on impact and up to three after...

We evaluate the extent to which a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model can account for the impact of "surprise" and "anticipated" tax shocks estimated from U.S. time-series data. In U.S. data, surprise tax cuts have expansionary and persistent effects on output, consumption, investment...

We provide empirical evidence on the effects of tax liability changes in the United States. We make a distinction between "surprise" and "anticipated" tax shocks. Surprise tax cuts give rise to a large boom in the economy. Anticipated tax liability tax cuts are instead associated with a...

We provide empirical evidence on the dynamic effects of tax liability changes in the United States. We distinguish between surprise and anticipated tax changes using a timing-convention. We document that pre-announced but not yet implemented tax cuts give rise to contractions in output,...

Using Monte Carlo experiments, we examine the performance of indirect inference tests of DSGE models in small samples, using various models in widespread use. We compare these with tests based on direct inference (using the Likelihood Ratio). We find that both tests have power so that a...

Using Monte Carlo experiments, we examine the performance of Indirect Inference tests of DSGE models, usually versions of the Smets-Wouters New Keynesian model of the US postwar period. We compare these with tests based on direct inference (using the Likelihood Ratio), and on the Del...

We add the Bernanke-Gertler-Gilchrist model to a modified version of the Smets-Wouters model of the US in order to explore the causes of the banking crisis. We test the model against the data on HP-detrended data and reestimate it by indirect inference; the resulting model passes the Wald test on...

We extend the method of indirect inference testing to data that is not filtered and so may be non-stationary. We apply the method to an open economy real businss cycle model on UK data. We review the method using a Monte Carlo experiment and find that it performs accurately and has good power.