In response to the record-breaking COVID19 recession, many governments have adopted unprecedented fiscal stimuli. While countercyclical fiscal policy is effective in fighting conventional recessions, little is known about the effectiveness of fiscal policy in the current environment with...

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...

Previous studies argue that, based on the New Keynesian framework, a fiscal stimulus financed by money creation has a strong positive effect on output under a reasonable degree of nominal price rigidities. This paper investigates the effects of an implementation lag in a money-financed fiscal...

Previous studies argue that, based on the New Keynesian framework, a fiscal stimulus financed by money creation has a strong positive effect on output under a reasonable degree of nominal price rigidities. This paper investigates the effects of implementation lag in the money-financed fiscal...

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...

A key issue in current research and policy is the size of fiscal multipliers when the economy is in recession. Using a variety of methods and data sources, we provide three insights. First, using regime-switching models, we estimate effects of tax and spending policies that can vary over the...

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...

This paper examines the macroeconomic effects of government spending shocks in Canada for the period of 1949 - 2012. We use the narrative record, mostly the budget speech, to identify the size, timing, and principal motivation for all planned major government spending changes. To achieve...

Using VAR analysis on US data, we show that unanticipated fiscal expansions boost private consumption and business formation. Models with an extensive investment margin, i.e. endogenous firm and product entry, have difficulties explaining these two phenomena simultaneously. Considering different...

The short-run macroeconomic effectiveness of fiscal policy depends on the effect of policy on AD and the effect of AD on output. This paper examines how macroeconomic perspectives (Keynesian, Post Keynesian, monetarist, classical, new classical, and new Keynesian) describe the effect of AD on...