In Beijing, the metropolitan government has made enormous place based investments to increase green space and to improve public transit. We examine the gentrification consequences of such public investments. Using unique geocoded real estate and restaurant data, we document that the construction...

This paper contributes to the debate about fiscal multipliers by studying the impacts of government investment in conventional neoclassical growth models. The analysis focuses on two dimensions of fiscal policy that are critical for understanding the effects of government investment:...

We use the World Bank decomposition of aggregate investment shares into their private and public components to test for the correlation between volatility and investment in a set of developing countries. We uncover a statistically significant negative correlation between various volatility...

This paper presents new updated and improved estimates of various components of governments' contribution to national wealth and its growth in the post-war period. The primary conclusions drawn are: (1). The federal government's assets, tangible and financial, are substantial; they grew more...

When private incentives are insufficient, a big push by government may lead to industrialization. This paper uses mobilization for World War II to test the big push hypothesis in the context of postwar industrialization in the American South. Specifically, I investigate the role of capital...

Saving is essential to the health of economies because it provides the wherewithal for investment. In the late nineteenth century, saving was also essential to the health of urban working-class households. This study brings together information from surveys of household spending and saving,...

Wealth inequality is rising in rich countries. Capital taxation used simply to finance redistribution may not be able to counteract this trend, but can increased public investment financed by higher capital taxes? We examine how such a policy affects the distribution of wealth in a setting with...

We consider the effect of excluding government investment from the deficit subject to the limits of the European Stability and Growth Pact. In the model we consider, residents of a given country discount future costs and benefits of government spending more than efficiency would dictate, because...

This paper shows that those low and middle income countries that use infrastructure inefficiently pay a growth penalty in the form of a much smaller benefit from infrastructure investments. The magnitude of this penalty is apparent when the growth experience of Africa is compared with that of...

Large publicly-held pools of assets are playing an increasingly prominent role in the global investment arena. We compare three distinct forms of such public funds, namely foreign exchange reserve funds, sovereign wealth funds, and public pension funds, to highlight their differences and...