How does private consumption react to an exogenous increase in government expenditure? Standard structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) usually report a positive GDP as well as consumption response, while event studies report a negative consumption response. We investigate in a SVAR whether...

We propose a method for indentifying discretionary fiscal policy with real time data. The starting point is the observation that automatic stabilizers should depend on true GDP, while discretionary fiscal policy depends on the information that policy makers have in real time. We approximate the...

Renewed interest in fiscal policy has increased the use of quantitative models to evaluate policy. Because of modeling uncertainty, it is essential that policy evaluations be robust to alternative assumptions. We find that models currently being used in practice to evaluate fiscal policy...

We quantify the fiscal multipliers in response to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. We extend the benchmark Smets-Wouters (Smets and Wouters, 2007) New Keynesian model, allowing for credit-constrained households, the zero lower bound, government capital and distortionary...

During the Great Recession following the recent financial crisis large fiscal stimuli were implemented to counteract labor market sclerosis. We explore the effectiveness of various fiscal packages in a matching model featuring inefficient unemployment and a rich fiscal sector employing...

Renewed interest in fiscal policy has increased the use of quantitative models to evaluate policy. Because of modelling uncertainty, it is essential that policy evaluations be robust to alternative assumptions. We find that models currently being used in practice to evaluate fiscal policy...

According to reputational models of political economy, a term limit may change the behavior of a chief executive because he does not have to stand for election. We test this hypothesis in a sample of 52 countries over the period 1977-2000, using government spending, social and welfare spending...

We investigate the effects of government expenditure on private consumption when the private sector anticipates the fiscal shocks. In order to capture anticipation of fiscal policy, we develop a new method based on a structural vector autoregression (SVAR). By simulating data from a theoretical...

This paper documents the systematic response of postwar U.S. fiscal policy to fiscal imbalances and the business cycle using a multivariate Fiscal Taylor Rule. Adjustments to taxes and purchases both account for a large portion of the fiscal response to debt, while authorities seem reluctant to...