Search Results
Working Paper
A critical analysis of the Eisner-Pieper fiscal measure
Working Paper
A note on the sustainability of fiscal policy
Journal Article
The automatic fiscal stabilizers: quietly doing their thing
Working Paper
The effect of taxes on money demand and aggregate demand
Working Paper
A retrospective evaluation of the effects of temporary partial expensing
This paper examines how business investment responded to temporary partial expensing, first enacted in 2002 and expanded in 2003. In principle, partial expensing boosted the incentive to invest which should have had a discernable impact on spending. However, the tax changes did not occur in a vacuum, so it is challenging to isolate their impact. Our empirical approach exploits a feature of the tax change which, under certain assumptions, allows us to cleanly estimate its impact. Specifically, partial expensing provided relatively generous tax treatment for long-lived assets. We use this ...
Working Paper
Linear data transformations used in economics
The paper examines the properties of standard data transformations--such as growth rates and moving averages--used by applied economists. Because many resources are devoted to understanding the economic significance of incoming data by government and financial-market economists, for example, this paper considers data filters that do not drop recent observations, in contrast to the approximately "ideal" measures recently developed in the literature. Using frequency-domain techniques, it is established that moving averages of multi-period growth rates can attenuate the bias and phase shifts ...
Discussion Paper
The effects of fiscal policy on the U.S. economy
Working Paper
Motor vehicle stocks, scrappage, and sales
This paper offers a new framework for analyzing aggregate sales of new motor vehicles that incorporates separate models for the change in the vehicle stock and for the rate of vehicle scrappage. Because this approach requires only a minimal set of assumptions about demographic trends, the state of the economy, consumer "preferences," new vehicle prices and repair costs, and vehicle retirements, it is shown to be especially useful as a macroeconomic forecasting tool. In addition, a new historical annual time series estimate of motor vehicle stocks in the United States is presented.
Working Paper
Forecasting exogenous fiscal variables in the United States
This paper provides an introduction to the practice of forecasting "exogenous" components of federal government taxes and spending-policy actions, for short--in the United States. First, we estimate simple models of defense expenditures that are useful for constructing current-quarter forecasts based on incoming daily and monthly spending data. Also, we discuss forecasting policy changes in the context of extending recent empirical work of Alan Auerbach (2002, 2003) on fiscal reaction functions. Forecasts of exogenous fiscal actions are an important input into forecasts of the budget ...