We study the effectiveness of public investment in stimulating an economy stuck in a liquidity trap. We do so in the context of a tractable new-Keynesian economy in which a fraction of government spending increases the stock of public capital subject to a time-to-build constraint. Public...

I develop a New Keynesian model with search and matching frictions, in which the government buys goods produced by the firms. I solve the non-linear model globally and examine the magnitude of government spending multipliers in and out of the ZLB. I distinguish the cases of Nash-bargained and...

We investigate the size of the multiplier at the ZLB in a New keynesian model. It ranges from around -0.25 to +1.5, depending on the extent to which government spending is productive, substitutable or not for private consumption.

Recently, a series of papers have argued that output multipliers of government spending can be potentially large during times when the Zero Lower Bound on nominal interest rates is binding (Christiano et al. (2011)). This literature generally considers "excess-savings" liquidity traps and...

We investigate the size of the multiplier at the ZLB in a New Keynesian model. It ranges from around −0.25 to +1.5, depending on the extent to which the government spending is productive, substitutable or not for private consumption.

Public investment represents a non-negligible fraction of total public expenditures. Yet, theoretical studies of the effects of public spending when the economy is stuck in a liquidity trap invariably assume that government expenditures are entirely wasteful. In this paper, we consider a...