We empirically test the effects of unanticipated positive versus negative fiscal policy shocks on the growth rate and the cyclical component of real private output. In doing so, we employed two alternative approaches. The first one uses vector autoregressive systems in order to construct the...

We empirically test the effects of unanticipated fiscal policy shocks on the growth rate and the cyclical component of real private output and reveal different types of asymmetries in fiscal policy implementation. The data used are quarterly U.S. observations over the period 1967:1 to 2011:4. In...