There seems to be a widespread belief among economists, policy-makers, and members of the media that the "confidence'" of households and businesses is a critical component in the transmission of fiscal policy shocks into economic activity. We take this proposition to the data using standard...

There have recently been suggestions for monetary policy to engineer higher inflation expectations so as to stimulate current spending. But what is the empirical relationship between inflation expectations and spending? We use the underlying micro data from the Michigan Survey of Consumers to...

This paper studies the state-dependence of the output and welfare effects of shocks to government purchases in a canonical medium scale DSGE model. When monetary policy is characterized by a Taylor rule, the output multiplier (the change in output for a one unit change in government spending) is...