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...

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...

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...

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...