During World War II and the Korean War, real GDP grew by about half the amount of the increase in government purchases. With allowance for other factors holding back GDP growth during those wars, the multiplier linking government purchases to GDP may be in the range of 0.7 to 1.0, a range...

This paper uses cross-section data on the U.S. states to test the hypothesis that budgeting and borrowing rules affect the level and composition of public spending. It employs a 1963 data set with detailed information on state capital budgeting practices to compare capital spending in states...

In this paper, we develop a new model for government cost-benefit analysis in the presence of risk. In our model, a benevolent government chooses the scale of a risky project in the presence of two key frictions. First, there are market failures, which cause the government to perceive project...

An understanding of the <i>qualitative</i> nature of the transitional dynamics of the neociassical model - the process of convergence from an initial capital stock to a steady state growth path - is a key part of the shared knowledge of most economists. It forms the basis, for example, of the...

The basic neoclassical growth model accounts well for the postwar cyclical behavior of the U.S. economy prior to the 1990s, provided that variations in population growth, depreciation rates, total factor productivity, and taxes are incorporated. For the 1990s, the model predicts a depressed...

This paper studies China's four-fold increase in per capita GDP relative to the U.S. between 1995 and 2019. First, we argue that China's growth pattern is very similar to that of several other East Asia economies that initially grew very quickly. Second, we show that a minimalist...

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...

Researchers, commentators, and politicians have devoted steadily more attention to infrastructure in response to claims that inadequate accumulation of public capital has contributed to substandard U.S. economic growth. Despite this, the link between infrastructure and productivity growth...

This paper presents a neoclassical model of international capital flows, public investment, and economic growth. Because public capital is non-traded and is imperfectly substitutable for private capital, the open economy converges only gradually to the Solow steady-state notwithstanding the fact...

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:...