This paper presents a test of Wagner's Law for the OECD countries using data from 1960 to 1995. Unlike other analyses of Wagner's Law, explicit allowance is made in the paper for the effect of changes in the age distribution of the population on public spending. The results show that the...

We use a model of intertemporal tax smoothing to examine long run data on fiscal policy in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. We find that the intertemporal model provides a good description of tax policy for the United States but is rejected for Australia and for the UK.

We study the effects of growth volatility and inflation volatility on average rates of output growth and inflation for postwar U.S. data in a multivariate asymmetric GARCH-M model. Our statistical model differs from other work in that we allow the conditional covariance of inflation and growth...

This paper looks at the interaction between public and private consumption in Australia. The results show that there is substitution between private and public consumption in the long-run and that in the short-run, changes to government consumption secures a retourn to equilibrium following a shock.

Research by Ghali (1999) tested for the existence of causality between wages and prices in United States' aggregate data using a multivariate cointegration framework. We show that Ghali's model is misspecified and that the correct specification leads to a different interpretation of the long-run...

This paper tests a version of Barro's tax smoothing hypothesis using Australian data for the period 1964/65 to 194/95. The model assumes intertemporal optimisation by a government ssking to minimise the distortionary effects of tax collection.

India has a long history of running fiscal deficits. Two broad considerations motivate a government to run a deficit: tax smoothing and tax tilting. This paper tests a version of Barro's tax smoothing model, using Indian data for the period 1951-52 to 1966-97. The empirical results indicate that...

In this paper we investigate the relationship between inflation and unemployment in Australia, post 1959. We focus on two features of the data: firstly, we find that forecasting models are surprisingly stable through our sample period. We also estimate the nonaccelerating inflation rate of...

This paper presents new evidence on the ability of Peacock and Wiseman's displacement hypothesis to explain temporal increases in the ratio of government expenditure to GDP in the United Kingdom. Using univariate modelling techniques that are robust to structural changes in the underlying data...