In contemporary American political discourse, issues related to the scope, authority, and the cost of the federal government are perennially at the center of discussion. Any historical analysis of this topic points directly to the Great Depression, the "moment" to which most historians and...

Examines the American postwar economic policy in relation to the debate between heavy public spending and keeping a balanced budget. It specifically addresses the New Deal as a means to end the 1937 recession and its, secular-stagnation doctrine, public debt, and other topics

This paper uses the strategy and data of Blanchard and Perotti (BP) to identify fiscal shocks and estimate fiscal multipliers for the United States. With these results, it computes the cumulative multiplier of Ramey and Zubairy (2018), now common in the literature. It finds that, contrary to the...