We use a panel of developed and emerging countries for the period 1970-2008 to assess the cyclicality of education, health, and social security government spending. We mostly find acyclical behaviour, but evidence also points to counter-cyclicality for social security spending, particularly in...

The present paper analyzes the cyclicality of public spending on key social, economic and military sectors, including agriculture, education, health, social protection, transportation and military spending using data available for up to 40 developing countries spanning the period from 1980 to...

The dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models used to study business cycles typically assume that exogenous disturbances are independent first-order autoregressions. This paper relaxes this tight and arbitrary restriction by allowing for disturbances that have a rich contemporaneous...