Search Results
Journal Article
Measuring systematic monetary policy (commentary)
Working Paper
Are government spending multipliers greater during periods of slack? evidence from 20th century historical data
A key question that has arisen during recent debates is whether government spending multipliers are larger during times when resources are idle. This paper seeks to shed light on this question by analyzing new quarterly historical data covering multiple large wars and depressions in the U.S. and Canada. Using an extension of Ramey?s (2011) military news series and Jord?s (2005) method for estimating impulse responses, we find no evidence that multipliers are greater during periods of high unemployment in the U.S. In every case, the estimated multipliers are below unity. We do find some ...
Working Paper
Industry evidence on the effects of government spending
This paper investigates industry-level effects of government purchases in order to shed light on the transmission mechanism for government spending on the aggregate economy. We begin by highlighting the different theoretical predictions concerning the effects of government spending on industry labor market equilibrium. We then create a panel data set that matches output and labor variables to shifts in industry-specific government demand. The empirical results indicate that increases in government demand raise output and hours, but lower real product wages and productivity. Markups do not ...
Conference Paper
Estimating the effects of fiscal policy in OECD countries - comments
Working Paper
Tracking the source of the decline in GDP volatility: an analysis of the automobile industry
Recent papers by Kim and Nelson (1999) and McConnell and Perez-Quiros (2000) uncover a dramatic decline in the volatility of U.S. GDP growth beginning in 1984. Determining whether the source is good luck, good policy or better inventory management has since developed into an active area of research. This paper seeks to shed light on the source of the decline in volatility by studying the behavior of the U.S. automobile industry, where the changes in volatility have mirrored those of the aggregate data. We find that changes in the relative volatility of sales and output, which have been ...