We use regional variation in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009-2012) to analyze the effect of government spending on consumer spending. Our consumption data come from household-level retail purchases in Nielsen and auto purchases from Equifax credit balances. We estimate that a $1...

We test several hypotheses concerning the growth of public expenditure by the Austrian monarchy between 1870 and 1913 in relation to Wagner's law, as well as the impact of increasing public indebtedness and the expanding role of the Imperial Council towards the end of the analyzed period, using...

This paper demonstrates how adding nominal wage rigidity to a standard sticky price model can create a mechanism by which increases in government spending cause increases in consumption. The increase in output arising from government purchases puts upward pressure on the price level. At a fixed...

In this paper, we analyze the development of public consumption expenditure in Austria starting in the 1940s. We focus our attention on two hypotheses as to why public consumption expenditure has been constantly increasing: Wagner's law and Baumol's cost disease. The estimated income elasticity...

This paper investigates the efficiency of the public sector in a sense of public performance and expenditures. For 23 European countries and for the period between 1995 and 2015 we construct a measure of public sector performance that consist of nine distinct indices for each area of public...