Balanced budget requirements lead to substantial pro-cyclicality in state government spending on infrastructure and public services. Differences in the stringency of states’ budget rules drive the pace at which they must make these adjustments. We show that budget rules (and other fiscal...

This paper investigates the transmission mechanism of government spending shocks in an estimated dynamic general equilibrium model. I construct a New Keynesian model with distortionary labour and capital taxes and with references that allow the wealth effect on labour supply to vary in strength....

Using a large information approach and full Bayesian VAR techniques, we study the economic effects of fiscal policy shocks in the U.S. over the last five decades. We find that omitted variables can explain the well known sample instability of the estimates for the fiscal multiplier. We also find...

How should small states formulate a countercyclical fiscal policy to achieve economic stability and fiscal sustainability when prone to natural disasters, climate change, commodity price changes, and uncertain donor grants? We study how natural disasters and climate change affect long-term debt...

The U.S. manufacturing sector has become the poster child of the jobless recovery, the latest victim of the Bubble Economy. On Labor Day 2003 President Bush called for the creation of a new position of Assistant Secretary for Manufacturing in the Department of Commerce. The National Association...

I examine the effects of fiscal policy actions on private consumption in a yearly panel of sixteen OECD countries conditional on the phase of the business cycle and the state of the public finances. I demonstrate that binding liquidity constraints on households can alter the efficacy of the...

This paper surveys evidence on fiscal multipliers from the Euro area and the United States obtained by direct, cross-state or economywide measures of the effects of broad-based tax cuts and increases in government purchases. In view of the evidence in the literature I conclude that that fiscal...

This paper asks whether tax cycles can represent the optimal policy in a model without any extrinsic uncertainty. I show, in an economy without capital and where labor is the only choicevariable (a Lucas-Stokey economy), that a large class of preferences exists, where cycles are optimal, as well...

In the Covid-19 crisis, most OECD countries have used short-time work (subsidized working time reductions) to preserve employment relationships. This paper studies whether short-time work can save jobs through stabilizing aggregate demand in recessions. First, we show that the consumption risk...