This paper shows that government debt creates a so far neglected wealth effect that has sizable effects on business cycle fluctuations. We present a new channel through which governments can influence cyclical fluctuations generated by any type of shock and contribute to macroeconomic stability....

We show that the largest increase in unemployment benefits in U.S. history had large spending impacts and small job-finding impacts. This finding has three implications. First, increased benefits were important for explaining aggregate spending dynamics--but not employment dynamics--during the...

A model of growth with endogenous innovation and distortionary taxes is presented. Since innovation is the only source of volatility, any variable that influences innovation directly affects volatility and growth. This joint endogeneity is illustrated by working out the effects through which...

We estimate state-dependent government spending multipliers for the United States. We use a Factor-Augmented Interacted Vector Autoregression (FAIVAR) model. This allows us to capture the time-varying monetary policy characteristics including the recent zero interest rate lower bound (ZLB)...

We study the mechanics of transmission of fiscal shocks to labor markets. We characterize a set of robust implications following government consumption, investment and employment shocks in a RBC and a New-Keynesian model and use part of them to identify shocks in the data. In line with the...

Using state-dependent local projection methods and historical U.S. data, we find that government spending multipliers are considerably larger in periods of private debt overhang. In particular, we find significant crowding-out of personal consumption and investment in low-debt states, resulting...

Does the state of the business cycle matter for the effects of fiscal policy shocks on GDP? This study analyses quarterly German data from 1976 to 2009 in a threshold SVAR, expanding the SVAR approach by Blanchard and Perotti (2002). In a linear benchmark SVAR, the analysis finds that hiking...

After the Global Financial Crisis a controversial rush to fiscal austerity followed in many countries. Yet research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates was and still is unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This paper...

We estimate government spending multipliers in demand- and supply-driven recessions for the Euro Area. Multipliers in a moderately demand-driven recession are 2-3 times larger than in a moderately supply-driven recession, with the difference between multipliers being non-zero with very high...

An impulse response is the dynamic average effect of an intervention across horizons. We use the well-known Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to explore a response's heterogeneity over time and over states of the economy. This can be implemented with a simple extension to the usual local...