Showing 1 - 10 of 338
This paper discusses the effects of budget deficits on the economy in four steps. First, it reviews standard theory about how budget deficits influence saving, investment, the trade balance, interest rates, exchange rates, and long-term growth. Second, it offers a rough estimate of the magnitude...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013313756
How high can public debt rise without compromising fiscal solvency? We answer this question using a stochastic ability-to-pay model of sovereign default in which risk-neutral investors lend to a government that displays "fiscal fatigue," because its ability to increase primary balances cannot...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013130260
We develop a method for identifying and quantifying the fiscal channels that help finance government spending shocks. We define fiscal shocks as surprises in defense spending and show that they are more precisely identified when defense stock data are used in addition to aggregate macroeconomic...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013137024
Experimentally elicited discount rates are frequently higher than what one would infer from market interest rates and seem unreasonable for economic decision-making. Such high rates have often been attributed to present bias and hyperbolic discounting. A commonly recognized bias of standard...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013138321
In this paper, we estimate government purchase multipliers for a large number of OECD countries, allowing these multipliers to vary smoothly according to the state of the economy and using real-time forecast data to purge policy innovations of their predictable components. We adapt our previous...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013120206
One possible explanation for the difficulty in controlling the budget is that a major component of spending --tax expenditures--receives privileged status. It is treated as tax cuts rather than spending. This paper explores the implications of that classification and illustrates how it can lead...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013121734
We calculate the incidence of recent changes to the New Jersey state tax system on a sample of homeowners. Our analysis distinguishes between business-as-usual responses to an evolving fiscal situation and tax changes that constitute a surprise. The latter have incidence effects; the former do...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013124285
Attempting to shed light on the optimal size of government, economists have analyzed planning problems that specify a set of feasible taxation-spending policies and a social welfare function. The analysis characterizes the optimal policy choice of a planner who knows the welfare achieved by each...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013104080
We consider demand systems for utility-maximizing consumers facing general budget constraints whose utilities are perturbed by additive linear shifts in marginal utilities. Budgets are required to be compact but are not required to be convex. We define demand generating functions (DGF) whose...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013108254
An extensive literature has studied lobbying by special interest groups. We analyze a novel lobbying channel: lobbying businessmen-politicians through business proxies. When a politician controls a business, firms attempting to curry favors shift their spending towards the politician's business....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013071306